Travelogue 145 -- July 16
Paris
Paris is a pretty town. I hope I'm the first with that observation. Trust me: it's pretty.
We take the high speed train from Nantes. I'm sound asleep the whole way. I awake to the sight of passing banlieux. I ask Francois if there are any riots scheduled today. What could be more French?
We dive into miles of underground tunnels, dash onto a Metro to stand among French armppits, dash onto another. When we emerge into the midday sunlight, we are on the Champs Elysees -- broad sidewalks and overpriced outdoor cafes in front of sublime buildings. We walk up to meet with pretty Sara, young British lawyer working a block from the Arc de Triomphe. Sara is going to run with us in Ethiopia this fall.
Kudos to Napoleon, by the way. The arch is more magnifique than anything the paltry Roman emperors threw up. The Corsican is everywhere. Look for the N encircled by a wreath all over town. You'll even see it on the Louvre.
By Gallic bon chance, we have scored digs a few blocks from the Louvre, right off the Place de la Concorde, a block from the Rue de St. Honore, where my Beverly Hills compatriots saunter, noses in the air as they contemplate global crises in hunger, poverty, war, and illiteracy. When they need a break, they shop. Who could blame them? It's a friend's flat, which he abandons for our benefit. The entry to the building does justice to the address, tall doors in a stone facade and a cool, tiled foyer. But we cross a tiny courtyard and climb a tight wooden staircase at an angle of 60° or so to our small rooftop flat. It's sweltering, but otherwise comfortable. From the windows, we see other rooftops and their dormer windows.
I would recommend Paris on Bastille Day (a name the Frenchies aren't familiar with). Dodge the crowds and parades, and head to the Louvre, which is free that day. Arrive at 8:30am for the 9am opening, and stand behind the Japanese college kids who are making a pajama party out of it, nibbling out of miniature cereal boxes. Don't carry a bag, and you'll get to bypass a bunch of people who have to be searched. Follow the crowd as they cross to the Denon wing; climb several staircases, passing rooms of glorious statuary; march down the long and grand hallway housing the Italian painters, passing Giotto, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Perugino, and Raphael without a pause; and follow the crowd as they turn into a bright and massive cube of a room to the right, in which she waits. Titian and others adorn the walls, but she stands alone in the middle of the room. Can you guess her name? She is captivating, no doubt about it. They speak of her smile, but today it's her eyes that intrigue me. What is the angle of her gaze? What is the color of her eyes?
Break away. Pay your respects to the Italians you snubbed on your way in. Look up once in a while to admire the palace itself. Don't forget Caravaggio and his dead whore in the role of the Virgin Mary. Don't bypass the ancient Greek 'Victory of Samothrace', no matter how discouraging the harlequin show of family portraiture en masse, camera flashes flickering like an unrelenting summer storm. Ask at the information desk for the way to Mary Magdalene's crypt, just for kicks.
I wonder why Master Brown didn't make use of the Madeleine, Napoleon's temple to Maiden Magdelene and Jesus the philosopher-king, just a kilometer or so from the Louvres. Napoleon is always good for romantic spice. The place has some strange magic to it, an effort in its exterior to out-Greek the Parthenon, and an effort in its interior to re-fashion the New Testament as an Hellenic pastoral with Gothic gilding. Why the Louvre and an 80s glass pyramid designed by a Chinese-American? Maybe it's questions like these that make for the limp aura of esoteric mystery that sells books and lures Amelie to Hollywood. Strange and wonderful our times.
I've seen the glamor. Now I seek the hip and smart. I'm in search of writers and artists. Where are the cafes like bare and unwashed cells, where shaven-headed youths in black suck down unfiltered smoke and argue semiotics? I try Montmartre. I find the seamy: lots of sex shops around the Moulin Rouge. I find the smarmy: the Place du Terte, showcase of 'art'. I find the scenic: Sacre Coeur, atop its hill with a grand view of Paris, and beside it the little St. Pierre, with the pink, pre-church Roman columns hidden in corners by the entrance. The closest I come to intellectual Paris is the bar across from a Watts-like park where an African-American is reading Tom Robbins over his beer.
I try Montparnasse of 'lost-generation' fame. The cafe where Hemingway drank wine and composed 'Fiesta' is now an expensive restaurant surmounted by an anonymous post-war building, surrounded by an anonymous and bustling big city neighborhood. I'm consoled as I eat at a cheaper place by a passing detachment of rumbling old tanks, like rogues gone AWOL from the parade.
Jonathan disabuses me of my illusion. 'Sartre is gone.' Jonathon is an old friend of Francois' from Nantes, French of Sephardic Jewish blood, a writer whom no one has read, taciturn and cynical and solitary. He gestures toward the Sorbonne; he gestures toward the outdoor cafe, where slack-faced tourists catch their breath. 'They can talk to you about Zizou and about TV shows, and that's it. Paris is gone. You know, we grew up with that picture, too, and now it's past. It's all America, now, my friend.' He takes my measure, as though assessing the ugliness of our times. His sneer is the slightest but most expressive curl of lip. Right: I found it. Thank you.
Cheerfully, I ask him what Materazzi could have said to Zizou. He doesn't know, but he says the French hero has inpired a new move in street fighting out in the banlieux called the zizette.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
Travelogue 144 -- July 12
Under the Shining Moon
Sara likes Formula One. We can forgive her that. She is Italian. Her father and brother are enthusiasts. She calls home to Cremona during races for narration. She works in a Bond Street boutique, taking an English language break from her marketing course at home. She's passionate about sports. She grimaces and shouts and gesticulates through the World Cup final. She forgives me and Pete and the African-French man next to us for cheering on the French.
Pete and I come early and secure premier seating at our World Cup pub in Mayfair. Then we watch as the place fills with Italians, mortified -- not because we're outnumbered but because every woman is a jaw-dropping beauty. It will be a long night.
Sara is so gorgeous that Pete refuses to speak to her. I’m thinking her grip on my knee when the game is tense means conversation is okay. Between her imprecations flung at the TV, we chat in English and Italian.
Alex, the Russian youth at the window, joins in. He speaks Italian fluently. He says it's because he studies economics in Bologna. That's his first story. Later, he's studying 'cucina'. He snorts with derision whenever I accept one of his stories but doesn't hesitate to tell another, nor to describe how he can bend anyone to his purposes. Pete has told him about Tesfa. 'I understand what you need. You need money.' I look into his grey laughing eyes, and I think 'Dickens'. One of his tales is that he's been on the street since he was twelve. He tells me in spider-web Italian how he will make my kids in Ethiopia into millionaires.
In my turn, I tell him a story of my own: I do what I do because of a woman. She died with a wish unfulfilled. In a few days, when the moon is full, it will be three years since she left us. He bows his head and smokes.
Alex doesn't get on with Sara too well. She replies with sass, and after a few exchanges, he resorts to a cool 'va fancul'. I ask him why he would say that. The young behaviorist says it will make her want him all the more.
It's the second extra period. Zidane, (or Zizou, as we Frenchies like to call him,) assaults Materazzi with a head butt to the chest. Our Italians explode with indignation. One boisterous man is yelling 'f**k you' at the TV, heavily-accented, complemented by loud gestures. I'm intrigued he curses in English. We in the corner keep our silence. Sara is quick with Zizou's failings as a human being, but she pats my arm in consolation.
Victory: Sara is on her feet with a scream. They're all shouting. They toss their flags at the TV. One principessa is held aloft to wave her flag to sing. The town is shouting. Pete and I wander outside, wide-eyed. The city has changed.
'Never before' are easy words, but I think I can use them honestly: never before have I seen this. Fans are spilling into the streets, streams of them emptying into a river along Piccadilly, into the sea at Piccadilly Circus, roaring, whistling, chanting, blowing horns. Cars creep among them and honk. Girls lean out car windows with flags. We navigate the seas for an hour and the fever does not abate. I am thunderstruck by this spontaneous joy that shuts down a city. 'Where did all these Italians come from?' Pete repeats. There's not a hint of menace to this mob, only good cheer. 'Only the Italians,' Pete says. And isn't that why we love them?
On the day of the full moon, I'm in the air again, reaching for heaven, recoiling from it. How far is it? Further than France.
From the air, Nantes is a white growth in the flat lands of the lower River Loire, a hop, skip and jump from the Atlantic Ocean. On the ground, it’s hot sun and a cool breeze carrying strains of accordian music along a narrow alleyway lined with eighteenth-century beauties and their iron balcony railings, the spires of the white basilica peeking over the rooftops.
Francois’ girlfriend gives me the tour of the historical center while he is busy. The only language we share is Spanish. My Spanish is really only a listening Spanish, which is convenient to the occasion. She narrates what survives of old Nantes. This district was an island when the bourgeoisie built their homes and shops, tall and crooked now on their beds of sand, like an old man’s teeth.
On the ground, Nantes is brilliant and green. Grey country roads meander among old, squat houses with walls of a hundred flat stones plastered together, looking pleasantly cool among their sweltering fields of corn. It’s wooded and sandy banks along the Loire, where a tour boat turns wide of a Mississippi sand-bar isle as it carries on from hilltop chateau to hilltop chateau. It blares in a foggy manner about the crumbling structure on the cliffs behind us, steeply terraced walls and gardens built by a nineteenth-century lord who loved his dying wife.
Nantes is a late and lingering meal with the family. Francois’ father is happy to tell me about the wines and cheeses we are tasting. I pose the question I’ve posed everyone since I arrived: ’What happened to Zizou?’ Well, the Italian clearly provoked it. He deserved far worse. And on it goes.
That night, the full moon climbs and hangs ascendant, white as first light, gentle but unfailing. She passes while I’m asleep.
Under the Shining Moon
Sara likes Formula One. We can forgive her that. She is Italian. Her father and brother are enthusiasts. She calls home to Cremona during races for narration. She works in a Bond Street boutique, taking an English language break from her marketing course at home. She's passionate about sports. She grimaces and shouts and gesticulates through the World Cup final. She forgives me and Pete and the African-French man next to us for cheering on the French.
Pete and I come early and secure premier seating at our World Cup pub in Mayfair. Then we watch as the place fills with Italians, mortified -- not because we're outnumbered but because every woman is a jaw-dropping beauty. It will be a long night.
Sara is so gorgeous that Pete refuses to speak to her. I’m thinking her grip on my knee when the game is tense means conversation is okay. Between her imprecations flung at the TV, we chat in English and Italian.
Alex, the Russian youth at the window, joins in. He speaks Italian fluently. He says it's because he studies economics in Bologna. That's his first story. Later, he's studying 'cucina'. He snorts with derision whenever I accept one of his stories but doesn't hesitate to tell another, nor to describe how he can bend anyone to his purposes. Pete has told him about Tesfa. 'I understand what you need. You need money.' I look into his grey laughing eyes, and I think 'Dickens'. One of his tales is that he's been on the street since he was twelve. He tells me in spider-web Italian how he will make my kids in Ethiopia into millionaires.
In my turn, I tell him a story of my own: I do what I do because of a woman. She died with a wish unfulfilled. In a few days, when the moon is full, it will be three years since she left us. He bows his head and smokes.
Alex doesn't get on with Sara too well. She replies with sass, and after a few exchanges, he resorts to a cool 'va fancul'. I ask him why he would say that. The young behaviorist says it will make her want him all the more.
It's the second extra period. Zidane, (or Zizou, as we Frenchies like to call him,) assaults Materazzi with a head butt to the chest. Our Italians explode with indignation. One boisterous man is yelling 'f**k you' at the TV, heavily-accented, complemented by loud gestures. I'm intrigued he curses in English. We in the corner keep our silence. Sara is quick with Zizou's failings as a human being, but she pats my arm in consolation.
Victory: Sara is on her feet with a scream. They're all shouting. They toss their flags at the TV. One principessa is held aloft to wave her flag to sing. The town is shouting. Pete and I wander outside, wide-eyed. The city has changed.
'Never before' are easy words, but I think I can use them honestly: never before have I seen this. Fans are spilling into the streets, streams of them emptying into a river along Piccadilly, into the sea at Piccadilly Circus, roaring, whistling, chanting, blowing horns. Cars creep among them and honk. Girls lean out car windows with flags. We navigate the seas for an hour and the fever does not abate. I am thunderstruck by this spontaneous joy that shuts down a city. 'Where did all these Italians come from?' Pete repeats. There's not a hint of menace to this mob, only good cheer. 'Only the Italians,' Pete says. And isn't that why we love them?
On the day of the full moon, I'm in the air again, reaching for heaven, recoiling from it. How far is it? Further than France.
From the air, Nantes is a white growth in the flat lands of the lower River Loire, a hop, skip and jump from the Atlantic Ocean. On the ground, it’s hot sun and a cool breeze carrying strains of accordian music along a narrow alleyway lined with eighteenth-century beauties and their iron balcony railings, the spires of the white basilica peeking over the rooftops.
Francois’ girlfriend gives me the tour of the historical center while he is busy. The only language we share is Spanish. My Spanish is really only a listening Spanish, which is convenient to the occasion. She narrates what survives of old Nantes. This district was an island when the bourgeoisie built their homes and shops, tall and crooked now on their beds of sand, like an old man’s teeth.
On the ground, Nantes is brilliant and green. Grey country roads meander among old, squat houses with walls of a hundred flat stones plastered together, looking pleasantly cool among their sweltering fields of corn. It’s wooded and sandy banks along the Loire, where a tour boat turns wide of a Mississippi sand-bar isle as it carries on from hilltop chateau to hilltop chateau. It blares in a foggy manner about the crumbling structure on the cliffs behind us, steeply terraced walls and gardens built by a nineteenth-century lord who loved his dying wife.
Nantes is a late and lingering meal with the family. Francois’ father is happy to tell me about the wines and cheeses we are tasting. I pose the question I’ve posed everyone since I arrived: ’What happened to Zizou?’ Well, the Italian clearly provoked it. He deserved far worse. And on it goes.
That night, the full moon climbs and hangs ascendant, white as first light, gentle but unfailing. She passes while I’m asleep.
Friday, July 07, 2006
Travelogue 143 – July 7
Yo Ho Ho
Everyone is relieved. Cool moisture has moved in, bringing with it refreshing breezes and light rains. It encourages a philosophical turn: time moves on. Even the most miserable summer is perishable. It decays into a dozen small autumns, and then one of them is real.
Wounds heal. The World Cup is one more tournament we didn’t win. The papers still stew over Rooney’s red card, describe his rage and hunger for vengeance, exorcising a mass petulance. Portugal went on to lose the next match, and all the media displayed images of the reviled Ronaldo, weeping and dejected at his own team’s elimination. Now it’s France and Italy on Sunday. Thomas wants Italy because he’s an Italophile. So am I for that matter, but Pete and I are pro-France. They seem to have more elegance and more personality. Who is cooler on the pitch than Zidane? Who carries himself with more Gallic nonchalance than Henry?
I may report next from France, as I’m developing plans to visit Francois. He’s back from Ethiopia and, since then, back from Spain, where his girlfriend was studying.
In the meantime, work on Tesfa-UK continues apace. Team Tesfa has survived its dubious performance Sunday. We’re healthy and whole, and plans for our November event in Ethiopia move forward. We’ve had a few bites from leaflets we passed out at the British 10K. We iron out the details of a partnership with a running store in London. I’m hoping that I can work in some benefits for Ethiopian runners that I recruit on the other end as trainers and event staff – shoes or sponsorships.
I pay visits to London schools that have agreed to twin with our new schools in Ethiopia. They are both in southwestern suburbs. Two days in a row, I catch my train out of Waterloo Station. Two days I disembark at sleepy stops and walk down long, leafy, anonymous streets. Two days I enter the cheery and colourful halls of those blessed places given over wholly to children. Two days I’m consumed by the pirate’s instinct for plunder. What I see is wealth: room after room of toys, furniture, computers, and an absolute glut of classroom materials. No more is the Western school one of those ‘normal’ places I take for granted, that I can walk through without seeing. For me, it’s a tour through Tiffany’s, blinding and distracting.
The teachers get it. Their first response is a discouraging sort of ‘Yes, of course,’ a bland eye-on-the-clock attendance. It’s British reserve. By the end of our interviews, they allow themselves cool signs of enthusiasm. And they do get it. Aha! I wasn’t steering too deeply into blind fantasy.
Pete encourages me to take a long walk after the second interview. He’s given me directions. It’s a favourite route of his from one erstwhile village turned suburb to another along the Thames.
It’s the end of the work day. Heat and light are mounting a last assault against the clouds, driving them apart and making them shine around their frayed edges. The school’s cute town, built around a lock on the Thames, gives way to a riverside wooded park. I’m alone on a dirt path, but for doves and the occasional guy on a mountain bike. I’ve been so busy and so city that it takes me a while to realize I’m in nature, but the poplars speak and the odd ray of sunshine draws my eye into the sky, smeared with a palette of soft shades.
I’m far from preoccupations by the time I emerge from the woods into long meadows. The clouds are in retreat, reduced to stooges in the sun’s evening drama. Long beams of light pour through them down into the hills. Ahead of me is Richmond, town on a hill overlooking a bend in the river. Tall Victorian facades keep watch over the valley.
The town itself is another cute one, predictable but inoffensively quaint, roads winding among shops and restaurants and leaking into narrow alleyways of pubs and history. It preserves in its center the old green, where now boys play Zidane and Pirlo, and men recline in the grass with beers. One face on the edge of the green is particularly delightful: the old Richmond Theatre, a fun, pink, turn-of-the-century production that this evening is drawing an impressive crowd, more people than I would have guessed could fit inside.
I’ve had to fight a fierce temptation to spend the evening in the movie theatre. The new Pirates of the Caribbean is debuting tonight. The impulse for movies is still strong in me as heroin might be for an ageing rocker, and the prices are lower here than in London, seven pounds fifty. I resist, chastely choosing a book in the green.
Today it’s London again, pleasantly chilled and half-grey. I notice a pair of women at a nearby café table poring over a guide to East Africa. I approach with a flyer about our November trip to Ethiopia. Why not?
Well, for one thing, the well-manicured one has just returned from her trip. She’s giving me her website address. This wasn’t just any trip, but a ten-month motor excursion from London to Cape Town. She’s telling me about Ethiopia, and she’s disappointed at all the sites there I’ve missed. She confides that the people were really the worst on the whole trip. She imitates their begging. But wonderful to speak to you, she says. I limp back to my small world.
Yo Ho Ho
Everyone is relieved. Cool moisture has moved in, bringing with it refreshing breezes and light rains. It encourages a philosophical turn: time moves on. Even the most miserable summer is perishable. It decays into a dozen small autumns, and then one of them is real.
Wounds heal. The World Cup is one more tournament we didn’t win. The papers still stew over Rooney’s red card, describe his rage and hunger for vengeance, exorcising a mass petulance. Portugal went on to lose the next match, and all the media displayed images of the reviled Ronaldo, weeping and dejected at his own team’s elimination. Now it’s France and Italy on Sunday. Thomas wants Italy because he’s an Italophile. So am I for that matter, but Pete and I are pro-France. They seem to have more elegance and more personality. Who is cooler on the pitch than Zidane? Who carries himself with more Gallic nonchalance than Henry?
I may report next from France, as I’m developing plans to visit Francois. He’s back from Ethiopia and, since then, back from Spain, where his girlfriend was studying.
In the meantime, work on Tesfa-UK continues apace. Team Tesfa has survived its dubious performance Sunday. We’re healthy and whole, and plans for our November event in Ethiopia move forward. We’ve had a few bites from leaflets we passed out at the British 10K. We iron out the details of a partnership with a running store in London. I’m hoping that I can work in some benefits for Ethiopian runners that I recruit on the other end as trainers and event staff – shoes or sponsorships.
I pay visits to London schools that have agreed to twin with our new schools in Ethiopia. They are both in southwestern suburbs. Two days in a row, I catch my train out of Waterloo Station. Two days I disembark at sleepy stops and walk down long, leafy, anonymous streets. Two days I enter the cheery and colourful halls of those blessed places given over wholly to children. Two days I’m consumed by the pirate’s instinct for plunder. What I see is wealth: room after room of toys, furniture, computers, and an absolute glut of classroom materials. No more is the Western school one of those ‘normal’ places I take for granted, that I can walk through without seeing. For me, it’s a tour through Tiffany’s, blinding and distracting.
The teachers get it. Their first response is a discouraging sort of ‘Yes, of course,’ a bland eye-on-the-clock attendance. It’s British reserve. By the end of our interviews, they allow themselves cool signs of enthusiasm. And they do get it. Aha! I wasn’t steering too deeply into blind fantasy.
Pete encourages me to take a long walk after the second interview. He’s given me directions. It’s a favourite route of his from one erstwhile village turned suburb to another along the Thames.
It’s the end of the work day. Heat and light are mounting a last assault against the clouds, driving them apart and making them shine around their frayed edges. The school’s cute town, built around a lock on the Thames, gives way to a riverside wooded park. I’m alone on a dirt path, but for doves and the occasional guy on a mountain bike. I’ve been so busy and so city that it takes me a while to realize I’m in nature, but the poplars speak and the odd ray of sunshine draws my eye into the sky, smeared with a palette of soft shades.
I’m far from preoccupations by the time I emerge from the woods into long meadows. The clouds are in retreat, reduced to stooges in the sun’s evening drama. Long beams of light pour through them down into the hills. Ahead of me is Richmond, town on a hill overlooking a bend in the river. Tall Victorian facades keep watch over the valley.
The town itself is another cute one, predictable but inoffensively quaint, roads winding among shops and restaurants and leaking into narrow alleyways of pubs and history. It preserves in its center the old green, where now boys play Zidane and Pirlo, and men recline in the grass with beers. One face on the edge of the green is particularly delightful: the old Richmond Theatre, a fun, pink, turn-of-the-century production that this evening is drawing an impressive crowd, more people than I would have guessed could fit inside.
I’ve had to fight a fierce temptation to spend the evening in the movie theatre. The new Pirates of the Caribbean is debuting tonight. The impulse for movies is still strong in me as heroin might be for an ageing rocker, and the prices are lower here than in London, seven pounds fifty. I resist, chastely choosing a book in the green.
Today it’s London again, pleasantly chilled and half-grey. I notice a pair of women at a nearby café table poring over a guide to East Africa. I approach with a flyer about our November trip to Ethiopia. Why not?
Well, for one thing, the well-manicured one has just returned from her trip. She’s giving me her website address. This wasn’t just any trip, but a ten-month motor excursion from London to Cape Town. She’s telling me about Ethiopia, and she’s disappointed at all the sites there I’ve missed. She confides that the people were really the worst on the whole trip. She imitates their begging. But wonderful to speak to you, she says. I limp back to my small world.
Monday, July 03, 2006
Travelogue 142 -- July 3
The Final Whistle
London is baking. It's hardly the time for a white-skinned and retiring race to be exerting themselves excessively. But they are out Sunday morning, lining up along Piccadilly to the sum of 20,000 or better for the British 10K. Few seem aware of the real significance of this occasion: the launch of Team Tesfa. Most would cite England's elimination from the World Cup yesterday as the historical reference point of the day.
It was a dramatic event. Pete and I watch the match with Portugal at our habitual World Cup pub in Mayfair. We're early enough to score a table. By half-time, the place is packed, and people are gathered around the windows and doors.
There's a code to this dance called football, and Pete is far more literate than I. The news he's picking up is all bad. He squirms and mutters. Where I see a lot of inconclusive back-and-forth, concluding after 90 minutes in a 0-0 tie, he reads a pattern of disgrace, wasted motion and wasted opportunities, a team with no plan, strategy or cohesion.
He perks up during the extra periods, as do we all. Spectators start in with commentary, ranging from the bland -- 'Let's go, boys' -- to the guttural and heavily-accented -- 'Kick him, studs up!' Play becomes more vital, though ultimately to no purpose. It goes to penalty kicks. Pete looks ill. The tall boy at the next table tells me in shrugging tones that the Brits never win when it comes to kicks.
For a moment, it looks like the curse is broken. Portugal is blocked. Teams trade more misses, but England turns in one too many. Each England miss is met with profound and unbearably tense silence in the pub. At the last, after a stunned and anguished beat or two, the place empties out. Pete and I remain to finish our pints. Pete announces with strained conviction that he's glad they lost, the way they were playing.
Indeed, watching the evening game later between France and Brazil, even an illiterate like myself can discern a difference in the level of play, an elegance and assuredness missing from England's game.
After the match, the streets of London are menacing. Near Trafalgar Square, we witness a tussle among Brazilians and shaven-headed locals. In the Tube, boys are shouting and prowling in a predatory way. The usual atmosphere of order in the British capital feels ready to unravel.
By the next day, the storm has cleared. Full-scale riots were averted, and cheery morning souls have reclaimed the streets, particularly Piccadilly. And ignorant as they may be that history is in their midst, there we stand, Team Tesfa, as impressive a quartet of pale, middle-aged plodders as any minor charity could ever hope to assemble. We have a fifth, Neil, who is actually the mastermind behind this our first run. He's a real runner, though, and has positioned himself near the starting line. The four plodders have casually settled into the middle of the serpentine mass, happy to gaze ahead at the colorful display of weekend humanity.
We're wearing our yellow iron-on 'Team Tesfa' Ts that Joe poured such care and time into. They're attractive, but we didn't count on the charity hothouse we were entering, where nearly everyone has associated him- or herself with some major name in humanitarianism and sports a sleek, professionally-designed running shirt. These reps of the Beverly Hills non-profits have cheerleaders along the course, ready with banners and smiles and water.
We face the miles of hot asphalt alone. Heroes that we are, we don't give it a second thought, but joke and chat away the time merrily. The race starts. We watch the leaders pass with admirable vigor. (The crowd has to turn in its ponderous approach to the starting line so that runners pass those still in line.) And we chat away the next half hour as we inch toward the start. About the time we sense that we may be close to the line, we glance back and notice that the entire crowd of thousands behind us has passed us by, presumably down the quicker-moving sides of the human river. We laugh and shuffle along. Our legs are stiff and our mood is anything but athletic by the time we reach the starting line, but we creak into motion nevertheless.
What follows is a blur of sweat and labored breathing. I build up some momentum, and in this heat the law of inertia must be obeyed. Move or stop. The trouble is, when you start at the back of the pack your path is littered with all manner of human obstacles. I launch into an elaborate and ceaseless 45-minute weave, no doubt adding two kilometers to my course, dodging thousands of panting and staggering Brits.
Pant and stagger we all do. The heat is extreme. St Thomas's Hospital on the south bank has to turn away victims of heat exhaustion and dehydration. I know this because one of our Team Tesfa troopers is among the first to be admitted. Another one stops to assist and to go along for the ambulance ride, so only half of Team Tesfa crosses the finish line. Only Neil achieves a time worthy of note, coming in 105th.
So it goes. Our debut is less than overwhelming. But isn't that History's MO? Always the shell game. Watch Beckham and you miss the real story. Just wait till next year!
The Final Whistle
London is baking. It's hardly the time for a white-skinned and retiring race to be exerting themselves excessively. But they are out Sunday morning, lining up along Piccadilly to the sum of 20,000 or better for the British 10K. Few seem aware of the real significance of this occasion: the launch of Team Tesfa. Most would cite England's elimination from the World Cup yesterday as the historical reference point of the day.
It was a dramatic event. Pete and I watch the match with Portugal at our habitual World Cup pub in Mayfair. We're early enough to score a table. By half-time, the place is packed, and people are gathered around the windows and doors.
There's a code to this dance called football, and Pete is far more literate than I. The news he's picking up is all bad. He squirms and mutters. Where I see a lot of inconclusive back-and-forth, concluding after 90 minutes in a 0-0 tie, he reads a pattern of disgrace, wasted motion and wasted opportunities, a team with no plan, strategy or cohesion.
He perks up during the extra periods, as do we all. Spectators start in with commentary, ranging from the bland -- 'Let's go, boys' -- to the guttural and heavily-accented -- 'Kick him, studs up!' Play becomes more vital, though ultimately to no purpose. It goes to penalty kicks. Pete looks ill. The tall boy at the next table tells me in shrugging tones that the Brits never win when it comes to kicks.
For a moment, it looks like the curse is broken. Portugal is blocked. Teams trade more misses, but England turns in one too many. Each England miss is met with profound and unbearably tense silence in the pub. At the last, after a stunned and anguished beat or two, the place empties out. Pete and I remain to finish our pints. Pete announces with strained conviction that he's glad they lost, the way they were playing.
Indeed, watching the evening game later between France and Brazil, even an illiterate like myself can discern a difference in the level of play, an elegance and assuredness missing from England's game.
After the match, the streets of London are menacing. Near Trafalgar Square, we witness a tussle among Brazilians and shaven-headed locals. In the Tube, boys are shouting and prowling in a predatory way. The usual atmosphere of order in the British capital feels ready to unravel.
By the next day, the storm has cleared. Full-scale riots were averted, and cheery morning souls have reclaimed the streets, particularly Piccadilly. And ignorant as they may be that history is in their midst, there we stand, Team Tesfa, as impressive a quartet of pale, middle-aged plodders as any minor charity could ever hope to assemble. We have a fifth, Neil, who is actually the mastermind behind this our first run. He's a real runner, though, and has positioned himself near the starting line. The four plodders have casually settled into the middle of the serpentine mass, happy to gaze ahead at the colorful display of weekend humanity.
We're wearing our yellow iron-on 'Team Tesfa' Ts that Joe poured such care and time into. They're attractive, but we didn't count on the charity hothouse we were entering, where nearly everyone has associated him- or herself with some major name in humanitarianism and sports a sleek, professionally-designed running shirt. These reps of the Beverly Hills non-profits have cheerleaders along the course, ready with banners and smiles and water.
We face the miles of hot asphalt alone. Heroes that we are, we don't give it a second thought, but joke and chat away the time merrily. The race starts. We watch the leaders pass with admirable vigor. (The crowd has to turn in its ponderous approach to the starting line so that runners pass those still in line.) And we chat away the next half hour as we inch toward the start. About the time we sense that we may be close to the line, we glance back and notice that the entire crowd of thousands behind us has passed us by, presumably down the quicker-moving sides of the human river. We laugh and shuffle along. Our legs are stiff and our mood is anything but athletic by the time we reach the starting line, but we creak into motion nevertheless.
What follows is a blur of sweat and labored breathing. I build up some momentum, and in this heat the law of inertia must be obeyed. Move or stop. The trouble is, when you start at the back of the pack your path is littered with all manner of human obstacles. I launch into an elaborate and ceaseless 45-minute weave, no doubt adding two kilometers to my course, dodging thousands of panting and staggering Brits.
Pant and stagger we all do. The heat is extreme. St Thomas's Hospital on the south bank has to turn away victims of heat exhaustion and dehydration. I know this because one of our Team Tesfa troopers is among the first to be admitted. Another one stops to assist and to go along for the ambulance ride, so only half of Team Tesfa crosses the finish line. Only Neil achieves a time worthy of note, coming in 105th.
So it goes. Our debut is less than overwhelming. But isn't that History's MO? Always the shell game. Watch Beckham and you miss the real story. Just wait till next year!
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Travelogue 141 – June 25
The Hrad
Slovakia is a country of mountains. In the valleys are beautiful villages and farms, and on the mountains are castles.
Like much of Eastern Europe, it was a battlezone for big neighbors and for small lords in times it was forgotten. Empires and warlords left behind a network of dark stone castles hanging onto cliffs and bluffs across the nation. They are warrior's castles, stout and inelegant, built for war and not for Disney sets.
Once the Austrians had firmly established their Pax Germana over the neighboring Slavs and Hungarians, Slovakia assumed its modern role of sleepy backwater and country cousins. The castles fell into disuse and disrepair. Most of them continue on in this state, their cold walls crumbling into the grass, their windows empty.
The Trencin castle is one of the jewels of the chain of ruins. It is larger than most, more dramatic, and has been tended by a devoted community.
Trenciansky Hrad (hrad is castle) sits immediately above the town on a high stone ridge that can only be approached from one direction. Every point on the compass affords a different, striking view of the castle. There are several circles of ancient wall – 'circles' being a misleading term, these walls hanging in odd sections along various cliffs, punctuated by small towers in various styles.
At the top is the tight complex of square buildings, the oldest bits being incomplete, dark and grassy stone walls; the youngest being rude nods to Renaissance style, red lines and embellishments among the cream and sets of windows jutting from high walls. The several major halls meet at odd angles, emblematic of the clash of eras they represent.
Construction apparently began in the 11th century. Major additions date to the 14th and 17th centuries. And there is the customary, botched restoration in the 19th. Lord and master in the 14th century was local bully Matus Cak, a colorful rebel against his Hungarian masters – and perhaps the last leader of the Slovaks. Check out his portrait in the museum.
The castle is visible for miles around. If it's not exactly the geographical center of the city, it is the heart. It was my good fortune eleven years ago to fall in with a group of young people whose lives revolved around the old hrad. They met there, rehearsed there, and often camped out. Most belonged to a group 'Wagus'. The name derives from an ancient version of the name of the local river, now called the Vah.
You see, in the aftermath of the fall of Communism, Slovakia has discovered herself in the mirror of history. Folk arts and a sort of medieval romanticism have become cottage industries here. Long-haired kids run through the woods in shifts of local fabrics and sing naive paeans to ancient spirits. Others congregate at the castles to re-enact medieval arts, rituals or war. I can well imagine one source of this romanticism when I consider Ethiopia's state-run TV: hours and hours of traditional dance and music and tedious tributes to cultural minutiae. Communist 'entertainment' was something similar.
(Qualifier: of course, these young romantics are still a small minority when compared to the kids who join the Western rat race gleefully, running off to Vienna or England, working in Slovakia for Western corporations, dropping out in good Western disaffection, succumbing to crime or drugs or punk fantasies of significant and ugly art....)
Wagus is a fencing group. They formed as the rust from the fallen Iron Curtain was still settling. Dusan was one of its founders and became guiding light to a generation of kids in Trencin. It began humbly enoug, with silly summer dramas based on local legends or common medieval tales, usually involving some sword play over a woman or wounded honor. But the shows became more sophisticated, and so did Dusan's ambitions. Not long after I left for America, I heard that Wagus had worked in battle scenes in some movie, and then another. They appeared in castle shows across Western Europe. Currently, Dusan's new group Normani stars all summer in Sedan, France, thrilling tourists with duels and jousting.
And so the memories of this town from my earlier sojourn are soaked in rather sentimental hues, as though they are glimpsed through stained glass or through a lady's sheer kerchief: folk songs around a campfire in the castle courtyard; running along the castle wall in bright afternoon sunlight with Zuzana, the blonde beauty with rosy lips and brilliant innocence in her pale blue eyes; talking all night in sleeping bags among high grass and sharp starlight; climbing the stairs of the tower with Daniela, the staircase a tight, curling tunnel; and of course the corny evening shows in high medieval costume that was designed and sewn by women in the group.
„The castle is our home,“ I recall Zuzana breathing with pure and sweet conviction. I believed it, as I would believe anything she uttered: 22 year-old maiden, always laughing.
She lives in Ottowa now with her two kids and Oskar, who never once gushed about the castle. They didn't return for their annual visit to Slovakia this year.
I jog along the Vah. The castle is always in view among the leaves of the riverside trees. The asphalt path is cracked. The grass is untidy. The river meanders; its banks don't follow straight lines like the Danube in Vienna does. With the breeze of my contentment, a veil of illusion parts or joins. One minute, the town is a lovely song and perfect. The next it's dirty, faded, and tired. If this is the spell of some Slavonic pseudo-Druids, I guess I don't mind so much.
The Hrad
Slovakia is a country of mountains. In the valleys are beautiful villages and farms, and on the mountains are castles.
Like much of Eastern Europe, it was a battlezone for big neighbors and for small lords in times it was forgotten. Empires and warlords left behind a network of dark stone castles hanging onto cliffs and bluffs across the nation. They are warrior's castles, stout and inelegant, built for war and not for Disney sets.
Once the Austrians had firmly established their Pax Germana over the neighboring Slavs and Hungarians, Slovakia assumed its modern role of sleepy backwater and country cousins. The castles fell into disuse and disrepair. Most of them continue on in this state, their cold walls crumbling into the grass, their windows empty.
The Trencin castle is one of the jewels of the chain of ruins. It is larger than most, more dramatic, and has been tended by a devoted community.
Trenciansky Hrad (hrad is castle) sits immediately above the town on a high stone ridge that can only be approached from one direction. Every point on the compass affords a different, striking view of the castle. There are several circles of ancient wall – 'circles' being a misleading term, these walls hanging in odd sections along various cliffs, punctuated by small towers in various styles.
At the top is the tight complex of square buildings, the oldest bits being incomplete, dark and grassy stone walls; the youngest being rude nods to Renaissance style, red lines and embellishments among the cream and sets of windows jutting from high walls. The several major halls meet at odd angles, emblematic of the clash of eras they represent.
Construction apparently began in the 11th century. Major additions date to the 14th and 17th centuries. And there is the customary, botched restoration in the 19th. Lord and master in the 14th century was local bully Matus Cak, a colorful rebel against his Hungarian masters – and perhaps the last leader of the Slovaks. Check out his portrait in the museum.
The castle is visible for miles around. If it's not exactly the geographical center of the city, it is the heart. It was my good fortune eleven years ago to fall in with a group of young people whose lives revolved around the old hrad. They met there, rehearsed there, and often camped out. Most belonged to a group 'Wagus'. The name derives from an ancient version of the name of the local river, now called the Vah.
You see, in the aftermath of the fall of Communism, Slovakia has discovered herself in the mirror of history. Folk arts and a sort of medieval romanticism have become cottage industries here. Long-haired kids run through the woods in shifts of local fabrics and sing naive paeans to ancient spirits. Others congregate at the castles to re-enact medieval arts, rituals or war. I can well imagine one source of this romanticism when I consider Ethiopia's state-run TV: hours and hours of traditional dance and music and tedious tributes to cultural minutiae. Communist 'entertainment' was something similar.
(Qualifier: of course, these young romantics are still a small minority when compared to the kids who join the Western rat race gleefully, running off to Vienna or England, working in Slovakia for Western corporations, dropping out in good Western disaffection, succumbing to crime or drugs or punk fantasies of significant and ugly art....)
Wagus is a fencing group. They formed as the rust from the fallen Iron Curtain was still settling. Dusan was one of its founders and became guiding light to a generation of kids in Trencin. It began humbly enoug, with silly summer dramas based on local legends or common medieval tales, usually involving some sword play over a woman or wounded honor. But the shows became more sophisticated, and so did Dusan's ambitions. Not long after I left for America, I heard that Wagus had worked in battle scenes in some movie, and then another. They appeared in castle shows across Western Europe. Currently, Dusan's new group Normani stars all summer in Sedan, France, thrilling tourists with duels and jousting.
And so the memories of this town from my earlier sojourn are soaked in rather sentimental hues, as though they are glimpsed through stained glass or through a lady's sheer kerchief: folk songs around a campfire in the castle courtyard; running along the castle wall in bright afternoon sunlight with Zuzana, the blonde beauty with rosy lips and brilliant innocence in her pale blue eyes; talking all night in sleeping bags among high grass and sharp starlight; climbing the stairs of the tower with Daniela, the staircase a tight, curling tunnel; and of course the corny evening shows in high medieval costume that was designed and sewn by women in the group.
„The castle is our home,“ I recall Zuzana breathing with pure and sweet conviction. I believed it, as I would believe anything she uttered: 22 year-old maiden, always laughing.
She lives in Ottowa now with her two kids and Oskar, who never once gushed about the castle. They didn't return for their annual visit to Slovakia this year.
I jog along the Vah. The castle is always in view among the leaves of the riverside trees. The asphalt path is cracked. The grass is untidy. The river meanders; its banks don't follow straight lines like the Danube in Vienna does. With the breeze of my contentment, a veil of illusion parts or joins. One minute, the town is a lovely song and perfect. The next it's dirty, faded, and tired. If this is the spell of some Slavonic pseudo-Druids, I guess I don't mind so much.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
Travelogue 140 – June 21
Daylight in the Mind
Happy Solstice to everyone! Stow the Catholic calendars and bank holidays. Give me a steamy longest day of the year beside a slow Slavic river.
The question current in my sun-addled mind is – what is my claim? To the first day of summer, to lazy rivers, to hippie sentiments like “Happy Solstice”? Maybe some claim to being a bona fide hippie, raised in California in the 60s and 70s.
And how about sweet homecomings in eastern Europe, whence forefathers fled their poverty in obscure times, following obscure pathways to the mines of Colorado? What´s my claim? I wouldn´t have thought it was a strong one, if the experience weren´t so strong. What´s the magic of this place?
I board my train at the Sudbahnhof in Vienna, traveling east. Doors unlock in the mind. Forgotten colors and scenes and scents are released. I have an hour in Bratislava before I catch another train north. It´s time enough for a quick foray into the town that I spent almost a year in, in the mid-nineties.
It´s funny, but I don´t believe the deepest hypnosis in Minnesota could have drawn out a picture of these first streets outside the station, though I walked them a hundred times eleven years ago. Here, one happy glance brings it all back. And more. Dozens of other streets sizzle to life, like a circuit board given a surge of juice. Faces light up. Buildings are floodlit in the mind; rooms come to life.
In the station, I grab a quick coffee and scan a Slovak newspaper. The words pulse with meaning. I´m understanding things I couldn´t have if I were staring at the same page in America.
And on it goes. Sitting in a crowded and sweaty cabin on the next train – bored student across from me, old man next to him, not so dissimilar from my dad, curious blue eyes taking me in – words appear unbidden into my mind, and I know them. It´s eerie, like movie cyborg learning. Without thinking about it, I know the fields, the stations, the hills. I rise from my seat as we approach the town, unprompted.
And here I am in Trenčin. (Have I been able to add the little, inverted caret over the c that makes it sound like ch? Please amend in your mind.) The castle stands on its Gibraltar high above the town, the steeply-peaked, wooden-shingled roof and the walls of the square central tower absorbing one more day of sunshine to add to more than 500 years of them. The castle is the heart and soul of this little town, and I´ll come back to it in another blog.
I stroll through the old town, the collection of pastel Austro-Hungarian confections that you will find all over south-eastern Europe, past the pink Hotel Tatra at the foot of the castle´s sheer rock. If you enter the hotel and climb to the mezzanine, you´ll find a window that opens onto the rock face. There you will see an inscription – “Victoriae!” – left by imperial Romans on a romp.
My first night I don´t spend in town. Daniela and I drive into the hills in her rumbling little Skoda. (Add a caret to make that “shkoda”. It should be pointed out that this is an old Czech brand and the name famously corresponds to an exclamation in Czech and Slovak that means “What a pity!” I can´t say which use of the word gave genesis to the other.)
Dušan (make that a sh, please) and his wife have bought a house in a village in the western hills, not too far from the Czech border. They bought it a week before leaving for France to work for the summer – more about that later – and left Daniela to check in on the place. Daniela has been cleaning the house, which is something of a wreck. Dušan was happy just to have land for his horses.
Beautiful land it is, a swath of poppy-sprinkled grasses overlooking hill after green hill that tumble down toward the wide valley where those slow, chugging trains travel between Trenčin and the capital.
We take a long, sunny walk along dirt lanes, between plum trees that must supply many a grandfather with slivovica, between apple trees and wild cherries, between currants red and black, among fields of grain, fallow fields, and haystacks. We pick huge strawberries from neglected gardens among wild onions. To Daniela´s delight, we discover wild strawberries, tiny and very red and very sweet.
It is spring´s last day. It feels like summer is months along and months to go. Lazily, we brush away the circling gnats, and it´s like we´re done with history. I never left.
Daylight in the Mind
Happy Solstice to everyone! Stow the Catholic calendars and bank holidays. Give me a steamy longest day of the year beside a slow Slavic river.
The question current in my sun-addled mind is – what is my claim? To the first day of summer, to lazy rivers, to hippie sentiments like “Happy Solstice”? Maybe some claim to being a bona fide hippie, raised in California in the 60s and 70s.
And how about sweet homecomings in eastern Europe, whence forefathers fled their poverty in obscure times, following obscure pathways to the mines of Colorado? What´s my claim? I wouldn´t have thought it was a strong one, if the experience weren´t so strong. What´s the magic of this place?
I board my train at the Sudbahnhof in Vienna, traveling east. Doors unlock in the mind. Forgotten colors and scenes and scents are released. I have an hour in Bratislava before I catch another train north. It´s time enough for a quick foray into the town that I spent almost a year in, in the mid-nineties.
It´s funny, but I don´t believe the deepest hypnosis in Minnesota could have drawn out a picture of these first streets outside the station, though I walked them a hundred times eleven years ago. Here, one happy glance brings it all back. And more. Dozens of other streets sizzle to life, like a circuit board given a surge of juice. Faces light up. Buildings are floodlit in the mind; rooms come to life.
In the station, I grab a quick coffee and scan a Slovak newspaper. The words pulse with meaning. I´m understanding things I couldn´t have if I were staring at the same page in America.
And on it goes. Sitting in a crowded and sweaty cabin on the next train – bored student across from me, old man next to him, not so dissimilar from my dad, curious blue eyes taking me in – words appear unbidden into my mind, and I know them. It´s eerie, like movie cyborg learning. Without thinking about it, I know the fields, the stations, the hills. I rise from my seat as we approach the town, unprompted.
And here I am in Trenčin. (Have I been able to add the little, inverted caret over the c that makes it sound like ch? Please amend in your mind.) The castle stands on its Gibraltar high above the town, the steeply-peaked, wooden-shingled roof and the walls of the square central tower absorbing one more day of sunshine to add to more than 500 years of them. The castle is the heart and soul of this little town, and I´ll come back to it in another blog.
I stroll through the old town, the collection of pastel Austro-Hungarian confections that you will find all over south-eastern Europe, past the pink Hotel Tatra at the foot of the castle´s sheer rock. If you enter the hotel and climb to the mezzanine, you´ll find a window that opens onto the rock face. There you will see an inscription – “Victoriae!” – left by imperial Romans on a romp.
My first night I don´t spend in town. Daniela and I drive into the hills in her rumbling little Skoda. (Add a caret to make that “shkoda”. It should be pointed out that this is an old Czech brand and the name famously corresponds to an exclamation in Czech and Slovak that means “What a pity!” I can´t say which use of the word gave genesis to the other.)
Dušan (make that a sh, please) and his wife have bought a house in a village in the western hills, not too far from the Czech border. They bought it a week before leaving for France to work for the summer – more about that later – and left Daniela to check in on the place. Daniela has been cleaning the house, which is something of a wreck. Dušan was happy just to have land for his horses.
Beautiful land it is, a swath of poppy-sprinkled grasses overlooking hill after green hill that tumble down toward the wide valley where those slow, chugging trains travel between Trenčin and the capital.
We take a long, sunny walk along dirt lanes, between plum trees that must supply many a grandfather with slivovica, between apple trees and wild cherries, between currants red and black, among fields of grain, fallow fields, and haystacks. We pick huge strawberries from neglected gardens among wild onions. To Daniela´s delight, we discover wild strawberries, tiny and very red and very sweet.
It is spring´s last day. It feels like summer is months along and months to go. Lazily, we brush away the circling gnats, and it´s like we´re done with history. I never left.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Travelogue 139 – June 16
Eden with a Snarl
Michael lives in Floridsdorf, a working class neighborhood of Vienna, north and across the river from the 'zentrum'. It's made up of square buildings on quiet streets. Michael's is one of the few Floridsdorf buildings that survived Allied bombing. You can tell the survivors by the modest ornamental garlands and fasces in imitation of their grander brethren downtown. Casualties were replaced in the 50s and 60s, as you can tell by art deco plaques or lettering on the walls, often with sad little mod Socialist bas-reliefs of workers or geometrical mosaics of children with musical instruments -- mid-century notations for hope. Michael's family has lived in this flat for four generations.
I like it here because I can jog to the Danube, which is lined by miles of pedestrian pathways. Every morning, I run for an hour by banks of fragrant mown grass, by water as still as glass – let's say mildly rippled as medieval glass. The sun has been strong all week. Vienna is so preternaturally quiet that I feel lost in a strange new Eden.
In the city, the Danube is divided into two channels that they call the Old and New Danube. The land between is all parkland. North of the city are a string of wooded hills, many with slopes cultivated with grapes. Atop the highest hill is a church with green cupolas. It is here, Michael tells me, the attack is launched that breaks the Turkish seige of Vienna in the 17th century. The successful army is German, Pole, and Czech – all the people Austrians hate, he says.
For the first few days, all I see is idyllic parkland, Michael's nature circuit – birch forests; perfect and still fields of peas or corn; more vineyards; vistas of peaceful hills; dirt paths beside cattails and lily pads, where solo middle-aged men loiter naked among the bushes – until I wonder where the city I remember from years ago could be hidden.
Finally, I cajole him into taking me to the 'zentrum', where he guides me unenthusiastically around the premier sights – the Hapsburg palace, the opera house, Stephansdom, etc. Lustily, I drink in the architectural delights, nostalgic for empire – from the safety of my 21st century bourgeois comforts, of course. We stop by the Cafe Sperl, a specimen of imperial-era coffee house: high ceilings, mirrors, subdued luxury and an air of indolence; irritable baristas, fabulous torts, black coffee with orange liqueur.
It's nighttime. Michael leads me to quiet medieval streets near Stephansdom, to Mozart's old digs, now a museum. He tries his post office box key in the museum door, and it works. We skulk across the ground floor museum and into the high and narrow courtyard of the tenement where the composer rented and wrote. We climb a few stories in the darkness. Michael tsks loudly. "They've ruined it," he says. It does look a bit antiseptic. They've glassed in the open courtyard. I imagine a light winter rain falling past us, like into a well.
Everywhere we go, Michael's dog, Lenny, goes. He's a musclebound boy with some Rotweiler features. He has Rotweiler moods, growling and bristling suddenly, attacking dogs or lunging at people. No one seems fazed by these outbursts, nor by those of their own beasts. Dogs are prolific here, many with muzzles. They create a dissonant note in Eden, as do the naked men in the woods and the heavy metal monster graffiti everywhere. What would Sigmund say?
I'm sitting in a cafe on Prager Strasse, one of the larger, anonymous boulevards in Floridsdorf. I learn quickly that a 'cafe' is something different here. I peek into a few: slot machines, shelves of booze, full ashtrays. I walk into the 'Cafe Al Bundy' – could I make that up? -- and am caught in the stare of a sad and sagging barmaid who may have stood there since the Turks were at the gates. I escape. I settle for the Cafe Extravaganza, red and black pleather and American hip-hop, a slot machine in the back, a tattooed and heavily made-up Slovak girl in front, displaying a whole lot of summer-tanned flesh. I tell her I'm on my way to her homeland. She's as unimpressed as the tattooed and scantily-clad Slovak bartender that Pete was enamored of in London.
Well, whatever the soviet of liberated barmaids may think, tomorrow I board the train down river. Part that ghostly iron curtain ....
Eden with a Snarl
Michael lives in Floridsdorf, a working class neighborhood of Vienna, north and across the river from the 'zentrum'. It's made up of square buildings on quiet streets. Michael's is one of the few Floridsdorf buildings that survived Allied bombing. You can tell the survivors by the modest ornamental garlands and fasces in imitation of their grander brethren downtown. Casualties were replaced in the 50s and 60s, as you can tell by art deco plaques or lettering on the walls, often with sad little mod Socialist bas-reliefs of workers or geometrical mosaics of children with musical instruments -- mid-century notations for hope. Michael's family has lived in this flat for four generations.
I like it here because I can jog to the Danube, which is lined by miles of pedestrian pathways. Every morning, I run for an hour by banks of fragrant mown grass, by water as still as glass – let's say mildly rippled as medieval glass. The sun has been strong all week. Vienna is so preternaturally quiet that I feel lost in a strange new Eden.
In the city, the Danube is divided into two channels that they call the Old and New Danube. The land between is all parkland. North of the city are a string of wooded hills, many with slopes cultivated with grapes. Atop the highest hill is a church with green cupolas. It is here, Michael tells me, the attack is launched that breaks the Turkish seige of Vienna in the 17th century. The successful army is German, Pole, and Czech – all the people Austrians hate, he says.
For the first few days, all I see is idyllic parkland, Michael's nature circuit – birch forests; perfect and still fields of peas or corn; more vineyards; vistas of peaceful hills; dirt paths beside cattails and lily pads, where solo middle-aged men loiter naked among the bushes – until I wonder where the city I remember from years ago could be hidden.
Finally, I cajole him into taking me to the 'zentrum', where he guides me unenthusiastically around the premier sights – the Hapsburg palace, the opera house, Stephansdom, etc. Lustily, I drink in the architectural delights, nostalgic for empire – from the safety of my 21st century bourgeois comforts, of course. We stop by the Cafe Sperl, a specimen of imperial-era coffee house: high ceilings, mirrors, subdued luxury and an air of indolence; irritable baristas, fabulous torts, black coffee with orange liqueur.
It's nighttime. Michael leads me to quiet medieval streets near Stephansdom, to Mozart's old digs, now a museum. He tries his post office box key in the museum door, and it works. We skulk across the ground floor museum and into the high and narrow courtyard of the tenement where the composer rented and wrote. We climb a few stories in the darkness. Michael tsks loudly. "They've ruined it," he says. It does look a bit antiseptic. They've glassed in the open courtyard. I imagine a light winter rain falling past us, like into a well.
Everywhere we go, Michael's dog, Lenny, goes. He's a musclebound boy with some Rotweiler features. He has Rotweiler moods, growling and bristling suddenly, attacking dogs or lunging at people. No one seems fazed by these outbursts, nor by those of their own beasts. Dogs are prolific here, many with muzzles. They create a dissonant note in Eden, as do the naked men in the woods and the heavy metal monster graffiti everywhere. What would Sigmund say?
I'm sitting in a cafe on Prager Strasse, one of the larger, anonymous boulevards in Floridsdorf. I learn quickly that a 'cafe' is something different here. I peek into a few: slot machines, shelves of booze, full ashtrays. I walk into the 'Cafe Al Bundy' – could I make that up? -- and am caught in the stare of a sad and sagging barmaid who may have stood there since the Turks were at the gates. I escape. I settle for the Cafe Extravaganza, red and black pleather and American hip-hop, a slot machine in the back, a tattooed and heavily made-up Slovak girl in front, displaying a whole lot of summer-tanned flesh. I tell her I'm on my way to her homeland. She's as unimpressed as the tattooed and scantily-clad Slovak bartender that Pete was enamored of in London.
Well, whatever the soviet of liberated barmaids may think, tomorrow I board the train down river. Part that ghostly iron curtain ....
Monday, June 12, 2006
Travelogue 138 – June 12
Sultans of Play
It´s hot in London. The sun blazes and Londoners are both grateful and irritable. The truth is, they seem unsettled by the responsibilities that sustained sunshine imposes on them. On Sunday, there is a Cuban festival along the south bank of the Thames. We give it our best shot, wading into the tightly compressed crowds. I gather occasional impressions of activities Cuban: people with plates of rice and beans, wafts of Caribbean rhythms, stalls of arts and crafts, always several shoulder-lengths away. Our group suffers severe casualties: scowls and desperate dashes for open air, resistance to being pulled back, and finally disappearance. We make it to a decidedly un-Cuban pub to catch our breath. I make myself the last loss, escaping across the Blackfriars Bridge, eyes on St. Paul's.
The flags are out. Building faces are swathed in World Cup patriotism. That's not the Union Jack but the English flag: red cross on white.
Pete and I are working in his office Saturday morning, so we duck into a pub in nearby Mayfair to watch England's first match of the series, against Paraguay. All in all, it's not the experience it should be. Beckham gets a goal on a free kick four minutes in, but only after a defender deflects it. The rest is a lackluster performance by a bunch of soccer superstars. England's team is packed with names that even a soccer illiterate like myself can recognize.
The pub is comfortable. A gentle breeze from the open windows cools us. No one rises from his seat. Mayfair is quiet on weekends. All wrong. We should have been back in working class London, on our feet and crammed in among sweaty fans who are bawling in our ears. I feel cheated – as does all England by Beckham's band of pretty boys.
On Friday afternoon, we meet up with Neil, who has volunteered as a board member for Tesfa-UK. We meet him at his place of work, at Coram's Fields, which fortuitously is the grounds of what may be Britain's oldest charity, Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital.
Coram was a shipwright who, upon retiring to solid land in London, was horrified by the numbers of abandoned children in the city's streets. He determined to do something about it. It took him nearly twenty years, but he eventually raised the money to open his institution. The Hospital opened its doors in 1741.
The Hospital moved out in the 50s, but the neighborhood – near Bloomsbury-- voted that the land should stay devoted to children. It became the city's first public playground for children. No adult is allowed without a child.
Neil is a 'play professional'. He plays with children. He organizes after-school programs. He supervises other play people.
Here's the fun thing about Coram's history. Among his strongest boosters were famous London artists of the day, in particular William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel, both of whom contributed themselves.
Handel donated the proceeds from an annual performance of the Messiah in the Hospital's chapel. Hogarth donated art and persuaded friends to do the same, creating inside the Foundling Hospital Britain's first public art gallery – an experiment that led to the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. There is still a collection on the grounds, with works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, and others.
We stroll around the dusty central playground, between basketball and soccer; beside the famous colonnade where the boys were taught how to make rope for ships; by the petting zoo where the sheep need shearing. They pant and stare at us, alert with fear. Initially, this courtyard was something of a parade ground. Girls were trained to be maids, and boys were marched in preparation for the military.
Now I see ships. They ply the waters between England and Holland. I'm flying again, headed for the dark heart of Europe. It's a Ryan Air flight, which means the Ryan Air experience – democratic lines at check-in and the gate, the dash across the tarmac for the steps at front and back of the aircraft, no seat assignments, no service during the flight, and all for about $25 via the web.
I'm paying special attention to the conversation in the seats behind me, cheered by the rhythms of a language I haven't heard in years. Happily, I pick out forgotten words, some of which retain meaning in my memory.
In a couple hours, I touch down on new-old ground and look for familiar faces. My mission? More of my strange summer brew of peace and public relations, exile and creative administration, breathing a prayer to spirits of cohesion, "May the weave hold".
Sultans of Play
It´s hot in London. The sun blazes and Londoners are both grateful and irritable. The truth is, they seem unsettled by the responsibilities that sustained sunshine imposes on them. On Sunday, there is a Cuban festival along the south bank of the Thames. We give it our best shot, wading into the tightly compressed crowds. I gather occasional impressions of activities Cuban: people with plates of rice and beans, wafts of Caribbean rhythms, stalls of arts and crafts, always several shoulder-lengths away. Our group suffers severe casualties: scowls and desperate dashes for open air, resistance to being pulled back, and finally disappearance. We make it to a decidedly un-Cuban pub to catch our breath. I make myself the last loss, escaping across the Blackfriars Bridge, eyes on St. Paul's.
The flags are out. Building faces are swathed in World Cup patriotism. That's not the Union Jack but the English flag: red cross on white.
Pete and I are working in his office Saturday morning, so we duck into a pub in nearby Mayfair to watch England's first match of the series, against Paraguay. All in all, it's not the experience it should be. Beckham gets a goal on a free kick four minutes in, but only after a defender deflects it. The rest is a lackluster performance by a bunch of soccer superstars. England's team is packed with names that even a soccer illiterate like myself can recognize.
The pub is comfortable. A gentle breeze from the open windows cools us. No one rises from his seat. Mayfair is quiet on weekends. All wrong. We should have been back in working class London, on our feet and crammed in among sweaty fans who are bawling in our ears. I feel cheated – as does all England by Beckham's band of pretty boys.
On Friday afternoon, we meet up with Neil, who has volunteered as a board member for Tesfa-UK. We meet him at his place of work, at Coram's Fields, which fortuitously is the grounds of what may be Britain's oldest charity, Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital.
Coram was a shipwright who, upon retiring to solid land in London, was horrified by the numbers of abandoned children in the city's streets. He determined to do something about it. It took him nearly twenty years, but he eventually raised the money to open his institution. The Hospital opened its doors in 1741.
The Hospital moved out in the 50s, but the neighborhood – near Bloomsbury-- voted that the land should stay devoted to children. It became the city's first public playground for children. No adult is allowed without a child.
Neil is a 'play professional'. He plays with children. He organizes after-school programs. He supervises other play people.
Here's the fun thing about Coram's history. Among his strongest boosters were famous London artists of the day, in particular William Hogarth and George Frideric Handel, both of whom contributed themselves.
Handel donated the proceeds from an annual performance of the Messiah in the Hospital's chapel. Hogarth donated art and persuaded friends to do the same, creating inside the Foundling Hospital Britain's first public art gallery – an experiment that led to the foundation of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. There is still a collection on the grounds, with works by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Hogarth, and others.
We stroll around the dusty central playground, between basketball and soccer; beside the famous colonnade where the boys were taught how to make rope for ships; by the petting zoo where the sheep need shearing. They pant and stare at us, alert with fear. Initially, this courtyard was something of a parade ground. Girls were trained to be maids, and boys were marched in preparation for the military.
Now I see ships. They ply the waters between England and Holland. I'm flying again, headed for the dark heart of Europe. It's a Ryan Air flight, which means the Ryan Air experience – democratic lines at check-in and the gate, the dash across the tarmac for the steps at front and back of the aircraft, no seat assignments, no service during the flight, and all for about $25 via the web.
I'm paying special attention to the conversation in the seats behind me, cheered by the rhythms of a language I haven't heard in years. Happily, I pick out forgotten words, some of which retain meaning in my memory.
In a couple hours, I touch down on new-old ground and look for familiar faces. My mission? More of my strange summer brew of peace and public relations, exile and creative administration, breathing a prayer to spirits of cohesion, "May the weave hold".
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Travelogue 137 - June 8
And Counting
The blog stutters but the days go on. If anything, they accelerate for lack of accounting.
I'm back - back on the web, back from America, back in England. Mississippi on the left bank, the River Avon on the right, and the Thames around the next bend.
Minnesota still pulses under the surface of my skin, a low summer count. Three, the beat of ducks' wings as they cross my path on the riverside promenade to skim along the water's surface, or the snap of baby robin bills in their nest in a high corner of Craig's porch. I'm around long enough to see them from egg to first fluttering and falling flight. And they're gone.
Two, bunnies zigzagging in night's blackness ahead of my bike's front wheel. You don't see them until you're on them. A raccoon watches from behind a tree, his front paws leaning against the trunk.
One, the sun is cocktail red under one long line of clouds parallel to the horizon. They are etched in orange and purple light, and the space between land and vapors is a Jupiter's band of turmoil. The air is redolent with cut grass.
Zero, cotton falls from the trees and swirls in glaring anti-gravity, congregating at day's end along the lawn's edge. Zero, I'm gone.
I stayed with Alison this time, a few blocks from the river in Northeast Minneapolis, ten minutes on the bicycle from any memory or any meeting. Memories and meetings - they gather densely, like the drifting cotton, drawn to summer sweat like mummy's gauze, bunding and stifling. Rest is air-conditioning at Alison's after a run, sinking into the white carpet that's brilliant in big window squares. I'm free. Noncommital clouds advance on listless breezes. The phone is silent. A breath: the foundation is a different day's rainbow. Ethiopia is a dream dissolving. I can just about glimpse my love in heaven. Her mantle is white noon. Zero, I'm gone.
There's an old woman next to me on the airplane. One of the 'Left Behind' series is on her lap. She stares with an addict's lack of focus. She has a way of interjecting the odd question into dead air. It's fortunate my book isn't too demanding. The sun never leaves us that night, receding below bloody clouds for a few hours and returning with a slow, blue dawn as we approach the waters of Europe.
“Gidde-gidde-gidde. … Baro.” Rocky is still a fixture in the Dinkytown Espresso Royale Café next to the University of Minnesota, resting deep in his habitual armchair, swaying slightly and chanting. Is it an Eritrean hymn? The question doesn't move me to ask. At the table next to him, Tunisian men play chess and shoot restless glaring glances at the rest of us. Around the room, wafers of silver light stand aslant. Young fashion monks meditate the digital illumination. Bam! The knight advances. “Gidde-gidde.” An old man with painted nails and long, stringy, bleach blonde hair rests a blank gaze on me. Chris, the manager banters with his bandmate as they prepare coffee drinks. “I'll tell you the episode I want to see: Kirk and the crew travel back in time and meet Depeche Mode.” “Baro,” Rocky sings. Zero, I'm gone.
Suddenly, we are beset by them, a tide of British mommies and their clean and pale and wide-eyed darlings. They rush the cookie table, where Pey and friends scramble for change. They swirl in clusters across the small gym room floor, arriving in eddies at my table. I feed myself again and again, demonstrating with reassuring smiles how Ethiopians eat their food - “with their hands.” Children are amazed. Moms avoid direct address. There's a dad; his face is tight with suspicion. Our video loops nearby. My kids introduce themselves over and over. “Abraham! Abraham! Biruktawit! Estipho!” Their letters are hung upon the walls. It's time I say something about them. I stand on a padded bench while a teacher shouts for attention. Slowly, he gets it, and it rotates upon me. The turning mass of hectic kids and harried parents stills. My comments vanish, and my eyelids grow heavy.
One, it starts again. Hot air balloons float overhead. From Pey's small back patio, you can see all of Bath - the Abbey, the rows of yellow limestone history, the glowing hills. You hear the roar of fire high above you. Red and yellow, they dangle up, against the direction of earth; they drift like jellyfish. You see the sudden flame. That's how they fly, kids: hot air.
Two, on we go.
And Counting
The blog stutters but the days go on. If anything, they accelerate for lack of accounting.
I'm back - back on the web, back from America, back in England. Mississippi on the left bank, the River Avon on the right, and the Thames around the next bend.
Minnesota still pulses under the surface of my skin, a low summer count. Three, the beat of ducks' wings as they cross my path on the riverside promenade to skim along the water's surface, or the snap of baby robin bills in their nest in a high corner of Craig's porch. I'm around long enough to see them from egg to first fluttering and falling flight. And they're gone.
Two, bunnies zigzagging in night's blackness ahead of my bike's front wheel. You don't see them until you're on them. A raccoon watches from behind a tree, his front paws leaning against the trunk.
One, the sun is cocktail red under one long line of clouds parallel to the horizon. They are etched in orange and purple light, and the space between land and vapors is a Jupiter's band of turmoil. The air is redolent with cut grass.
Zero, cotton falls from the trees and swirls in glaring anti-gravity, congregating at day's end along the lawn's edge. Zero, I'm gone.
I stayed with Alison this time, a few blocks from the river in Northeast Minneapolis, ten minutes on the bicycle from any memory or any meeting. Memories and meetings - they gather densely, like the drifting cotton, drawn to summer sweat like mummy's gauze, bunding and stifling. Rest is air-conditioning at Alison's after a run, sinking into the white carpet that's brilliant in big window squares. I'm free. Noncommital clouds advance on listless breezes. The phone is silent. A breath: the foundation is a different day's rainbow. Ethiopia is a dream dissolving. I can just about glimpse my love in heaven. Her mantle is white noon. Zero, I'm gone.
There's an old woman next to me on the airplane. One of the 'Left Behind' series is on her lap. She stares with an addict's lack of focus. She has a way of interjecting the odd question into dead air. It's fortunate my book isn't too demanding. The sun never leaves us that night, receding below bloody clouds for a few hours and returning with a slow, blue dawn as we approach the waters of Europe.
“Gidde-gidde-gidde. … Baro.” Rocky is still a fixture in the Dinkytown Espresso Royale Café next to the University of Minnesota, resting deep in his habitual armchair, swaying slightly and chanting. Is it an Eritrean hymn? The question doesn't move me to ask. At the table next to him, Tunisian men play chess and shoot restless glaring glances at the rest of us. Around the room, wafers of silver light stand aslant. Young fashion monks meditate the digital illumination. Bam! The knight advances. “Gidde-gidde.” An old man with painted nails and long, stringy, bleach blonde hair rests a blank gaze on me. Chris, the manager banters with his bandmate as they prepare coffee drinks. “I'll tell you the episode I want to see: Kirk and the crew travel back in time and meet Depeche Mode.” “Baro,” Rocky sings. Zero, I'm gone.
Suddenly, we are beset by them, a tide of British mommies and their clean and pale and wide-eyed darlings. They rush the cookie table, where Pey and friends scramble for change. They swirl in clusters across the small gym room floor, arriving in eddies at my table. I feed myself again and again, demonstrating with reassuring smiles how Ethiopians eat their food - “with their hands.” Children are amazed. Moms avoid direct address. There's a dad; his face is tight with suspicion. Our video loops nearby. My kids introduce themselves over and over. “Abraham! Abraham! Biruktawit! Estipho!” Their letters are hung upon the walls. It's time I say something about them. I stand on a padded bench while a teacher shouts for attention. Slowly, he gets it, and it rotates upon me. The turning mass of hectic kids and harried parents stills. My comments vanish, and my eyelids grow heavy.
One, it starts again. Hot air balloons float overhead. From Pey's small back patio, you can see all of Bath - the Abbey, the rows of yellow limestone history, the glowing hills. You hear the roar of fire high above you. Red and yellow, they dangle up, against the direction of earth; they drift like jellyfish. You see the sudden flame. That's how they fly, kids: hot air.
Two, on we go.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Travelogue 136 – May 13
Procession
In the last week I've walked along the banks of three rivers: the Tiber, the Thames, and the Mississippi. The waters, the colors of moss and storms and mud, the curling eddies, flow on. I’m Caesar, Tudor, Sioux and more: in other words, irrelevant.
The skies in Minnesota today are exhilarating. Angry grey masses intrude upon the blue, dropping half-hour doses of rain on the city. Strong gusts blow. After each set of clouds passes, we get steamy sunshine.
London was touched by a bit of the wild last weekend. A sort of storm moved among us. I came upon it three times in three days -- at Whitehall, at Trafalgar Square, at Piccadilly. I sense it as I approach: a swelling of sound among the buildings, a crowd, a feeling of something oversized.
The first time I see it is no accident. Neil leads us to it. Neil and Pete work in Mayfair, on Cork Street, famous for its art galleries. Pete has met an ageing Stone, aspiring painter, across the street. We cross Piccadilly, run by St. James Square, down to the Pall Mall. The crowd is thick at the Horse Guards’ Parade – where an elephant slumbers.
Slowly, at the show’s appointed hour, the elephant stirs. It rises and it stretches it trunk out. It roars. The elephant’s face is carved from wood. So are its back and sides. Its guts are metal and run by several men in Indian garb sitting in chairs and pushing levers. It stands and the crowd backs away. It begins its trek across London, spouting water through its trunk at screeching children. Riding on its back are Sherlock Holmes and a belly dancer.
The girl has a wooden face, too, and she blinks like the elephant does. She moves with more grace than most puppets, even though she's the height of about three men. She sits astride a red London tour bus and follows the elephant.
The girl arrived in a spacecraft that looks like a barrel of stout with portals. It has crashed into the street just off Pall Mall. We passed the capsule on the way. It smokes and the asphalt is buckled around it. Very convincing.
This is street theatre, a production by a French troupe called Royal de Luxe. The elephant has already stalked the streets of Nantes, and now it spends a weekend in London. The show is a hit, judging by the crowds that gather for it. They follow with wonder. There's a Jules Verne story behind the strange, gargantuan cast, but it hardly matters.
I doubt that Verne wrote about the band pulled behind the elephant on a cart. On the first day, there's a British rocker and his ensemble -- he has the craggy face of an eighty year-old under his stylish African hat, but he moves like a stiff twenty year-old.
On paper, this wizardry would have made me skeptical, but enjoying it firsthand with the tykes on their daddies' shoulders, seeing the craft in the manufacture of the puppets, and most of all, seeing giants lumbering among the streets of London, was sweet. It awakened a sense of whimsy. It broke through in the way it was meant to.
Suddenly I'm back in America. I feel a bit like a lumbering pachyderm myself here -- not in any sense of size or majesty, but of clumsiness and dissonance. I ride to Craig's from the airport on the light rail, and study faces. They seem lost. These aren't the composed and purposeful riders of the Tube, or the grumpy cast of the Roman Metro. The eyes seem eloquently empty.
I'm riding my bike between rain showers today. I take shelter from one shower in the doorway of the new Guthrie Theater. The hard blue exterior is nearly finished. I peer in and watch shadowy workers pick their way among the detritus of construction. Above me is the bloated face of George Bernard Shaw, one story tall. Beside him is Chekhov. Together we watch the progress of the rain across the surface of the river.
Procession
In the last week I've walked along the banks of three rivers: the Tiber, the Thames, and the Mississippi. The waters, the colors of moss and storms and mud, the curling eddies, flow on. I’m Caesar, Tudor, Sioux and more: in other words, irrelevant.
The skies in Minnesota today are exhilarating. Angry grey masses intrude upon the blue, dropping half-hour doses of rain on the city. Strong gusts blow. After each set of clouds passes, we get steamy sunshine.
London was touched by a bit of the wild last weekend. A sort of storm moved among us. I came upon it three times in three days -- at Whitehall, at Trafalgar Square, at Piccadilly. I sense it as I approach: a swelling of sound among the buildings, a crowd, a feeling of something oversized.
The first time I see it is no accident. Neil leads us to it. Neil and Pete work in Mayfair, on Cork Street, famous for its art galleries. Pete has met an ageing Stone, aspiring painter, across the street. We cross Piccadilly, run by St. James Square, down to the Pall Mall. The crowd is thick at the Horse Guards’ Parade – where an elephant slumbers.
Slowly, at the show’s appointed hour, the elephant stirs. It rises and it stretches it trunk out. It roars. The elephant’s face is carved from wood. So are its back and sides. Its guts are metal and run by several men in Indian garb sitting in chairs and pushing levers. It stands and the crowd backs away. It begins its trek across London, spouting water through its trunk at screeching children. Riding on its back are Sherlock Holmes and a belly dancer.
The girl has a wooden face, too, and she blinks like the elephant does. She moves with more grace than most puppets, even though she's the height of about three men. She sits astride a red London tour bus and follows the elephant.
The girl arrived in a spacecraft that looks like a barrel of stout with portals. It has crashed into the street just off Pall Mall. We passed the capsule on the way. It smokes and the asphalt is buckled around it. Very convincing.
This is street theatre, a production by a French troupe called Royal de Luxe. The elephant has already stalked the streets of Nantes, and now it spends a weekend in London. The show is a hit, judging by the crowds that gather for it. They follow with wonder. There's a Jules Verne story behind the strange, gargantuan cast, but it hardly matters.
I doubt that Verne wrote about the band pulled behind the elephant on a cart. On the first day, there's a British rocker and his ensemble -- he has the craggy face of an eighty year-old under his stylish African hat, but he moves like a stiff twenty year-old.
On paper, this wizardry would have made me skeptical, but enjoying it firsthand with the tykes on their daddies' shoulders, seeing the craft in the manufacture of the puppets, and most of all, seeing giants lumbering among the streets of London, was sweet. It awakened a sense of whimsy. It broke through in the way it was meant to.
Suddenly I'm back in America. I feel a bit like a lumbering pachyderm myself here -- not in any sense of size or majesty, but of clumsiness and dissonance. I ride to Craig's from the airport on the light rail, and study faces. They seem lost. These aren't the composed and purposeful riders of the Tube, or the grumpy cast of the Roman Metro. The eyes seem eloquently empty.
I'm riding my bike between rain showers today. I take shelter from one shower in the doorway of the new Guthrie Theater. The hard blue exterior is nearly finished. I peer in and watch shadowy workers pick their way among the detritus of construction. Above me is the bloated face of George Bernard Shaw, one story tall. Beside him is Chekhov. Together we watch the progress of the rain across the surface of the river.
Saturday, May 06, 2006
Travelogue 135 – May 6
La Pazza Vita
Loyal readers: I have to play a little catch-up. Travel has been intense. Some of you know I've left Rome already, but there was this little entry remaining to post from my time there. Sorry about the delay.
Statuario is a pretty neighborhood, but not one of the most convenient. It’s twenty minutes walk to the nearest internet and phone. It’s forty minutes by bus. Or a couple days, depending on politics. The other day, I waited an hour at a very pleasant bus stop. I had glimpsed something in the newspaper the week before about a sciopero, a strike, but I figured I would hear something more definite when the time came. I figured someone passing might mention it to me. I saw one bus go by the other way a long time ago....
I give up on going downtown, and I walk to the internet place. "Oh! There’s our American friend! God bless America," shouts ‘John’ in his thick Albanian accent. Short, haggard and shaggy, ‘John’ is permanently unshaven and always smoking. His sister or cousin – the story changes – runs the shop. I'm not sure his name is 'John'; he laughs when he offers it.
I’m fortunate today; the internet place is open on the first try. Usually this is a two-stop errand. The place will be mysteriously closed. Next try it will be "My American friend," and long discourses about life and work in Europe. Twice I have to call England, and twice I hear word for word the same bromide, with even the same hand motion, sandwiching the stale shop's air in front of his stomach. "It is rare to find both wisdom and courage in the same man." This is what England inspires in 'John'.
He isn't happy in Italy, after four years. "In the West, they say they are free. This is free? Free for what?" The Italians are up at sunrise to work and home late, only to lock themselves in with their families. This offends 'John'. He prefers Greece, where he lived for nine years. "They will take time to make their lives pleasurable, to play and indulge themselves in their mutual friendships."
Putin, he tells me -- in the same sententious tones as his remark about the British, Putin has warned that 'democracy' is just another weapon in the arsenal of the US and UK. I sympathize, though I have to tell him Putin doesn't win my award for most honorable world leader. 'John' shrugs.
When I log on the internet there, a porn site comes up first. When I open my email, 'John' stands behind me. He sways as he sets his glasses on his nose and reads my messages. I don't mind. I don't have many options in the neighborhood -- even for phone calls.
My landlord doesn’t have a landline. I took my British mobile into a local shop, also some twenty minutes away, and the boy couldn't help. He took the set apart like a soldier with his gun, being timed. He replaced the card, but the phone wouldn't take it. He shakes his head and that's that.
I stash the phone in my bag and console myself with coffee and a cornetto, sitting outside the caffe, admiring the gardens and the pastel houses with tiled roofs. Three old men are yelling about soccer. A bus halts in the narrow road while the driver gets coffee. Cars honk. Scooters race by like wasps.
I stop in a neighborhood outdoor market. Under tents, vendors sell fruits and household items out of boxes. Victim of packing under a hangover, I need underwear. I'm uncomfortable asking the young tough behind his tables about the 'slips', as they call their underwear here. He's amenable, handling his variety of 'slips' for my benefit. He shoves a few in a box, and he counts back my change in a palm glistening with snot. He notices and wipes it on his pants with a wink.
La Pazza Vita
Loyal readers: I have to play a little catch-up. Travel has been intense. Some of you know I've left Rome already, but there was this little entry remaining to post from my time there. Sorry about the delay.
Statuario is a pretty neighborhood, but not one of the most convenient. It’s twenty minutes walk to the nearest internet and phone. It’s forty minutes by bus. Or a couple days, depending on politics. The other day, I waited an hour at a very pleasant bus stop. I had glimpsed something in the newspaper the week before about a sciopero, a strike, but I figured I would hear something more definite when the time came. I figured someone passing might mention it to me. I saw one bus go by the other way a long time ago....
I give up on going downtown, and I walk to the internet place. "Oh! There’s our American friend! God bless America," shouts ‘John’ in his thick Albanian accent. Short, haggard and shaggy, ‘John’ is permanently unshaven and always smoking. His sister or cousin – the story changes – runs the shop. I'm not sure his name is 'John'; he laughs when he offers it.
I’m fortunate today; the internet place is open on the first try. Usually this is a two-stop errand. The place will be mysteriously closed. Next try it will be "My American friend," and long discourses about life and work in Europe. Twice I have to call England, and twice I hear word for word the same bromide, with even the same hand motion, sandwiching the stale shop's air in front of his stomach. "It is rare to find both wisdom and courage in the same man." This is what England inspires in 'John'.
He isn't happy in Italy, after four years. "In the West, they say they are free. This is free? Free for what?" The Italians are up at sunrise to work and home late, only to lock themselves in with their families. This offends 'John'. He prefers Greece, where he lived for nine years. "They will take time to make their lives pleasurable, to play and indulge themselves in their mutual friendships."
Putin, he tells me -- in the same sententious tones as his remark about the British, Putin has warned that 'democracy' is just another weapon in the arsenal of the US and UK. I sympathize, though I have to tell him Putin doesn't win my award for most honorable world leader. 'John' shrugs.
When I log on the internet there, a porn site comes up first. When I open my email, 'John' stands behind me. He sways as he sets his glasses on his nose and reads my messages. I don't mind. I don't have many options in the neighborhood -- even for phone calls.
My landlord doesn’t have a landline. I took my British mobile into a local shop, also some twenty minutes away, and the boy couldn't help. He took the set apart like a soldier with his gun, being timed. He replaced the card, but the phone wouldn't take it. He shakes his head and that's that.
I stash the phone in my bag and console myself with coffee and a cornetto, sitting outside the caffe, admiring the gardens and the pastel houses with tiled roofs. Three old men are yelling about soccer. A bus halts in the narrow road while the driver gets coffee. Cars honk. Scooters race by like wasps.
I stop in a neighborhood outdoor market. Under tents, vendors sell fruits and household items out of boxes. Victim of packing under a hangover, I need underwear. I'm uncomfortable asking the young tough behind his tables about the 'slips', as they call their underwear here. He's amenable, handling his variety of 'slips' for my benefit. He shoves a few in a box, and he counts back my change in a palm glistening with snot. He notices and wipes it on his pants with a wink.
Monday, May 01, 2006
Travelogue 134 – May 1
I Fiori, Part Two
A teenage boy asks me directions. I’ve had a string of these encounters lately. An old man asks me what ‘zona’ we’re in. An old woman stops her car beside me with her map unfolded in her lap. The boy I can answer. “Where is Via Squillace?” We have to shout over the traffic of the Via Appia Nuova. Keep going, I tell him. It’s across from le rovine, the ruins.
The Via Squillace is the Main Street of my little suburban village near the southern edge of Rome. The ‘zona’ is called Statuario, by the way, which I think is quite evocative. It’s got everything I need, cafes and markets. I’ve settled in among the stares quite comfortably. I haven’t been into the center of Rome for days.
Eric writes to ask why they stare. In a hundred years I could never fit in. The Italians have a keen sense for who is one of them, particularly in the south. And among northern Italians, Rome is known for its provincialism. If my looks weren’t a red flag, then one word, even in my very best Italian, would provoke the sour look. The good news is, once you have submitted to your disgrace, and have shown your face a few more times, they warm up to you – to a point.
The ruins that I guide the boy by are across the broad, crazy Via Appia Nuova from the terminus of my little Main Street. They occupy the top of a green hill surrounded by wide peaceful meadows. Skeletal and ghostly bits of wall stand, tall and red, empty walls and the high, round brick arches that they frame. This was the country villa of the Quintili, a noble family of ancient Rome. On the other side, across more silent meadows, the estate still has a gate on the ancient Appian way.
It’s a place for ghosts, and I can almost sense them. These aren’t the scary kind. These ghosts are purified by the ages, living where there are no roofs. They wear white and make elegant, solitary promenades among the grounds, reminiscing about the baths and the feasts and the poisonings. They craft long, ironic odes. They sleep for centuries.
I’m pretty tired myself these days. I’ve started running again. My comrades in London have signed me up for a 10K this summer. I might just finish two kilometers if the race were today, with an embarrassing effort of sweat and fury.
I run the other direction out of Statuario, away from the ghosts on the hill, down several typical Italian streets, where there are no sidewalks and the space between parked cars is just enough for a speeding Fiat to shave your thighs. There are several tiny underpasses under railroad tracks that you enter blindly because the meandering road veers into them. You hold your breath and dive in. If you survive the first one, you enter a small pocket of countryside, jogging between two flat green fields. If you survive the second, you enter the park.
Here you find more rovine, though I think any ghosts have been chased away by the kids playing soccer, with all the usual Italian vocalizations. Here you discover a long and lovely segment of an aqueduct built by the Emperor Claudius. Maybe it’s the adrenalin from having emerged alive from the hazards of an Italian roadway; maybe it’s the adrenalin of challenging fate with one more bone-rattling, heart-pounding run, but the sight is glorious. The arches of the aqueduct stretch across your field of vision, grey and weather-beaten, crumbling and clumsy with age, but beautiful nonetheless.
Between you and the aqueduct are rich meadows, so full of flowers that their shades of yellow overwhelm the green of the grass and make a brilliant concoction that makes you hungry. They are thick as foam on the shore, or bubbles in your spumante. Among the yellow are reds of poppies and the purple of some thistle flowers. Beyond and underneath the arches is a small grove of olive trees. You’re floating now. You run beside the square columns and overlook the sea of honey, and the pain is washed away.
I Fiori, Part Two
A teenage boy asks me directions. I’ve had a string of these encounters lately. An old man asks me what ‘zona’ we’re in. An old woman stops her car beside me with her map unfolded in her lap. The boy I can answer. “Where is Via Squillace?” We have to shout over the traffic of the Via Appia Nuova. Keep going, I tell him. It’s across from le rovine, the ruins.
The Via Squillace is the Main Street of my little suburban village near the southern edge of Rome. The ‘zona’ is called Statuario, by the way, which I think is quite evocative. It’s got everything I need, cafes and markets. I’ve settled in among the stares quite comfortably. I haven’t been into the center of Rome for days.
Eric writes to ask why they stare. In a hundred years I could never fit in. The Italians have a keen sense for who is one of them, particularly in the south. And among northern Italians, Rome is known for its provincialism. If my looks weren’t a red flag, then one word, even in my very best Italian, would provoke the sour look. The good news is, once you have submitted to your disgrace, and have shown your face a few more times, they warm up to you – to a point.
The ruins that I guide the boy by are across the broad, crazy Via Appia Nuova from the terminus of my little Main Street. They occupy the top of a green hill surrounded by wide peaceful meadows. Skeletal and ghostly bits of wall stand, tall and red, empty walls and the high, round brick arches that they frame. This was the country villa of the Quintili, a noble family of ancient Rome. On the other side, across more silent meadows, the estate still has a gate on the ancient Appian way.
It’s a place for ghosts, and I can almost sense them. These aren’t the scary kind. These ghosts are purified by the ages, living where there are no roofs. They wear white and make elegant, solitary promenades among the grounds, reminiscing about the baths and the feasts and the poisonings. They craft long, ironic odes. They sleep for centuries.
I’m pretty tired myself these days. I’ve started running again. My comrades in London have signed me up for a 10K this summer. I might just finish two kilometers if the race were today, with an embarrassing effort of sweat and fury.
I run the other direction out of Statuario, away from the ghosts on the hill, down several typical Italian streets, where there are no sidewalks and the space between parked cars is just enough for a speeding Fiat to shave your thighs. There are several tiny underpasses under railroad tracks that you enter blindly because the meandering road veers into them. You hold your breath and dive in. If you survive the first one, you enter a small pocket of countryside, jogging between two flat green fields. If you survive the second, you enter the park.
Here you find more rovine, though I think any ghosts have been chased away by the kids playing soccer, with all the usual Italian vocalizations. Here you discover a long and lovely segment of an aqueduct built by the Emperor Claudius. Maybe it’s the adrenalin from having emerged alive from the hazards of an Italian roadway; maybe it’s the adrenalin of challenging fate with one more bone-rattling, heart-pounding run, but the sight is glorious. The arches of the aqueduct stretch across your field of vision, grey and weather-beaten, crumbling and clumsy with age, but beautiful nonetheless.
Between you and the aqueduct are rich meadows, so full of flowers that their shades of yellow overwhelm the green of the grass and make a brilliant concoction that makes you hungry. They are thick as foam on the shore, or bubbles in your spumante. Among the yellow are reds of poppies and the purple of some thistle flowers. Beyond and underneath the arches is a small grove of olive trees. You’re floating now. You run beside the square columns and overlook the sea of honey, and the pain is washed away.
Monday, April 24, 2006
Travelogue 133 – April 24
I Fiori, Part One
It’s back to being stared at. Lucia lives in the far periphery of Rome, and residents aren’t subtle about their surprise. I pass a small, red-haired old lady in the cafe, and she turns all the way around to watch me walk to my seat. I would like to believe they’re all wondering about my power, grace and beauty, but I have a hunch it’s a different thought that motivates them. I don’t know Italian for ‘freak’.
Lucia lives very close to the Ciampino airport, where I arrive, but I still have to go into town to meet her. It’s easier that way. I enjoy the bus ride into the center. It’s afternoon. The air is warm and fragrant. We swing past fields dotted with poppies and daisies, down roads lined by the maritime pines so characteristic of Rome, with their high, flat crowns of gentle green. Enormous lilac blossoms hang from fences. We enter the ancient city walls under a narrow brick arch.
And so I’m back in Rome. The next day is a deep baptism. I take my first ride on a Vespa. Well, a scooter, as Lucia would point out. It’s not the Vespa brand. She is going into town, and I hitch a ride on back. Immediately, we’re weaving among traffic at 50. I’m trapped in her spare helmet, trying to hang on, though she has lost her foot pegs, and trying not to bump her helmet with mine when she brakes. I’m laughing the whole way, though I can easily imagine the mess I would make on the road with the least miscalculation.
She drops me at a Metro station. This isn’t the London tube. It’s dingy. There’s graffiti on everything. No one waits for people to disembark first. Passengers freely check each other out. They do have one strange tradition that may or may not arise from courtesy: if their station is next, they move toward the doors immediately after doors close. In a crowded car, that makes for a second and seemingly unnecessary shuffling of position at every stop. But when in Rome ....
Of course, in the center of Rome, not so many do as the Romans do. It’s spring, and the tourists are taking charge. The great irony about tourists is their self-absorption. They parade in noisy groups, afraid of eye contact. They comfort each other with a steady line of quips, and mediate with guidebooks and cameras. They have little sense of physical space or of the lives going on around them, wading through local traffic obliviously. And yet, with all these defense mechanisms in fierce deployment, they are nervous and greedy and distracted.
On Sunday morning, the tourists meet their match. The little old ladies are out. They plow along the streets in squads, burrowing onto the Metro and onto buses with amazing muscle. It’s best to stay alert. You will get hurt in Rome getting trapped between these two armies, the belligerently happy tourists and the grim, God-fearing matrons.
But I digress. My first full day in Rome ends with an expedition to Lake Albano, south of the city, with Lucia and her friends. It’s night so I don’t see much. It’s a weeknight, so we have the restaurant near the water to ourselves. We indulge in course after course of local specialties. Everything is meat and cheese, except for the artichokes and eggplant. There is prosciutto, porchetta, sausages, mozarella, some sort of breaded cheese, and lots of bread. Behind us, lights from across the lake play on the surface. The reflections come to us though shadows of leaves
Italians don’t need wine to encourage conversation, but the red stuff does turn up the volume and the laughter a notch or two. I’m quickly reminded that I don’t know Italian. Lucia is a teacher, and she knows how to speak to foreigners; my confidence was up. Now, the language flows like a Renaissance fountain. I admire the bubbling sound. Francesco and Maurizio launch into long stories that have everyone in stitches. Francesco weaves brilliant, breathless sentences that would fill pages of prose, all of it a kind of dreamy improvisation. He is finally checked by the ladies, who would like some air time.
Whether the wine improves their fluency, I can’t say, but it does improve listening comprehension. I sink into a beatific hypnotic state, and I understand. They’re talking politics. Francesco tells me about the old days when he and Guido had long hair and got into fistfights with the fascists in their housing complex. He’s falling into harlequin-Homeric rhythms again, and I’m keeping up.
It’s late. We have to have coffee. In three cars, we weave among the hills of Albano. Maurizio loses us. We outpace Francesco. There are conferences among our mobiles. We converge on Castel Gandolfo, a village above Albano, which Renaissance popes used as a retreat from the city. There’s nothing there. We race down to the quaint center of Albano, where we find an open caffe. Urgently, we toss back espresso and chatter. Sabienna from Albania is telling me how much she loves Italy. Her teeth are stained with wine.
Piacere. Buona notte. We’re off down the hill. Guido is upset with his date, who is riding with Francesco now, though she lives in Guido’s building. There are a lot of words about this. My magic wine is wearing off. I watch the streetlights and wonder how none of the roads are straight.
I Fiori, Part One
It’s back to being stared at. Lucia lives in the far periphery of Rome, and residents aren’t subtle about their surprise. I pass a small, red-haired old lady in the cafe, and she turns all the way around to watch me walk to my seat. I would like to believe they’re all wondering about my power, grace and beauty, but I have a hunch it’s a different thought that motivates them. I don’t know Italian for ‘freak’.
Lucia lives very close to the Ciampino airport, where I arrive, but I still have to go into town to meet her. It’s easier that way. I enjoy the bus ride into the center. It’s afternoon. The air is warm and fragrant. We swing past fields dotted with poppies and daisies, down roads lined by the maritime pines so characteristic of Rome, with their high, flat crowns of gentle green. Enormous lilac blossoms hang from fences. We enter the ancient city walls under a narrow brick arch.
And so I’m back in Rome. The next day is a deep baptism. I take my first ride on a Vespa. Well, a scooter, as Lucia would point out. It’s not the Vespa brand. She is going into town, and I hitch a ride on back. Immediately, we’re weaving among traffic at 50. I’m trapped in her spare helmet, trying to hang on, though she has lost her foot pegs, and trying not to bump her helmet with mine when she brakes. I’m laughing the whole way, though I can easily imagine the mess I would make on the road with the least miscalculation.
She drops me at a Metro station. This isn’t the London tube. It’s dingy. There’s graffiti on everything. No one waits for people to disembark first. Passengers freely check each other out. They do have one strange tradition that may or may not arise from courtesy: if their station is next, they move toward the doors immediately after doors close. In a crowded car, that makes for a second and seemingly unnecessary shuffling of position at every stop. But when in Rome ....
Of course, in the center of Rome, not so many do as the Romans do. It’s spring, and the tourists are taking charge. The great irony about tourists is their self-absorption. They parade in noisy groups, afraid of eye contact. They comfort each other with a steady line of quips, and mediate with guidebooks and cameras. They have little sense of physical space or of the lives going on around them, wading through local traffic obliviously. And yet, with all these defense mechanisms in fierce deployment, they are nervous and greedy and distracted.
On Sunday morning, the tourists meet their match. The little old ladies are out. They plow along the streets in squads, burrowing onto the Metro and onto buses with amazing muscle. It’s best to stay alert. You will get hurt in Rome getting trapped between these two armies, the belligerently happy tourists and the grim, God-fearing matrons.
But I digress. My first full day in Rome ends with an expedition to Lake Albano, south of the city, with Lucia and her friends. It’s night so I don’t see much. It’s a weeknight, so we have the restaurant near the water to ourselves. We indulge in course after course of local specialties. Everything is meat and cheese, except for the artichokes and eggplant. There is prosciutto, porchetta, sausages, mozarella, some sort of breaded cheese, and lots of bread. Behind us, lights from across the lake play on the surface. The reflections come to us though shadows of leaves
Italians don’t need wine to encourage conversation, but the red stuff does turn up the volume and the laughter a notch or two. I’m quickly reminded that I don’t know Italian. Lucia is a teacher, and she knows how to speak to foreigners; my confidence was up. Now, the language flows like a Renaissance fountain. I admire the bubbling sound. Francesco and Maurizio launch into long stories that have everyone in stitches. Francesco weaves brilliant, breathless sentences that would fill pages of prose, all of it a kind of dreamy improvisation. He is finally checked by the ladies, who would like some air time.
Whether the wine improves their fluency, I can’t say, but it does improve listening comprehension. I sink into a beatific hypnotic state, and I understand. They’re talking politics. Francesco tells me about the old days when he and Guido had long hair and got into fistfights with the fascists in their housing complex. He’s falling into harlequin-Homeric rhythms again, and I’m keeping up.
It’s late. We have to have coffee. In three cars, we weave among the hills of Albano. Maurizio loses us. We outpace Francesco. There are conferences among our mobiles. We converge on Castel Gandolfo, a village above Albano, which Renaissance popes used as a retreat from the city. There’s nothing there. We race down to the quaint center of Albano, where we find an open caffe. Urgently, we toss back espresso and chatter. Sabienna from Albania is telling me how much she loves Italy. Her teeth are stained with wine.
Piacere. Buona notte. We’re off down the hill. Guido is upset with his date, who is riding with Francesco now, though she lives in Guido’s building. There are a lot of words about this. My magic wine is wearing off. I watch the streetlights and wonder how none of the roads are straight.
Monday, April 17, 2006
Travelogue 132 – April 17
Boxes and Tubes
Easter Sunday, the tourists are still out. The streets of London are crowded, and many venues are open. Over my coffee, I try to remember what we Americans do on Easter. What were holidays about? I ask myself. The tourists will say it’s about touring.
My own touring continues. The day before Easter, Jayne invites us for an afternoon visit to an exhibition in the Somerset House. The Somerset House is an exhibit in itself, a turn-of-the-century governmental mansion on the Thames, with an impressive cobble-stoned courtyard inside. All this, you reflect, built for Inland Revenue. Serene classical stone for a corps of accountants. So be it. Now it’s a stop on the museum circuit.
Inside is a show of Russian photography from the 20s and earlier. They are remarkable little dreams, silver and sepia ghosts from a strange era – young dancers acting out myths and spells, dark peasants lost inside a haze of centuries. The art itself survives as a fragile moment between the czars and the Soviets. There is something to mourn in each tiny square.
Wander into the next set of small, dim rooms, and you’re confronted with quite a different world, the sparkle of aristocratic Europe strutting in powdered wigs. It’s a collection of snuff boxes. Dazzling spectacles these small items are, – (and yet hardly pocket-size; I wonder who carries these kits around) – caked with diamonds, sculpted ivory and gold, colorful enamel, and oval portraits or pastorals in miniature. I’m hypnotized. The gems are lit in such a way that they come to life.
One evening, I explore Notting Hill. “Since the movie,” Jayne says, the neighborhood has become even more chic and expensive. That’s the strange logic of modern cities. It’s cute, I decide, but it has that introverted, immaculate uniformity I’ve observed in all the wealthy neighborhoods in the West End.
By an odd set of circumstances, I have found myself in possession of a free ticket to a small but prestigious theatre in Notting Hill, the Gate Theatre. Below is a pub full of Hugh Grant wannabes. Upstairs is a confined little venue, recognizable the world over as the ubiquitous and magical black box. But this is England!
The show consists of two short plays by Pinter, who has himself participated in rehearsals, to the extent that a very old man with cancer can. The scripts are a bit tired, honestly – windows into the modernist-becoming-postmodernist mind, messages of meaningless, or meaningless messages about meaning, with meaning and for the meaning, or some such overwrought conundrum. An old man and wife air baskets of desperate alienation for the benefit of a silent, old beggar.
Fortunately, we haven’t transcended flesh-and-blood directors and actors yet, and their sensitivity and their beautiful voices rescue a story or a whole collection of stories from the morass. I am transported.
After the curtain, there is the London Tube. Always there is the London Tube.
An old black man sits across from me. He wears a sporty plaid cap. He’s compact; his fingernails are long. His eyes are warm and thoughtful. He can’t sit still. He fidgets even more fretfully as we enter King’s Cross station. He can’t contain himself. He tells the black ladies next to him in a Caribbean lilt, “This is the first stop from Jamaica. This is the stop.” They are confused. “After the plane and then the train...” Oh, they say, this was the first place you saw in London. That’s nice. He nods, and he watches the station disappear again. He settles into happy thoughts.
I’m waiting at a station, almost as far as Hackney. The overland trains are infrequent. There’s an old, ruddy-faced man on a nearby bench. He wears a luxuriant, chestnut wig. His two front teeth remain to him, though they are chipped and have absorbed their fair share of tobacco.
In a soft brogue, he informs me that things have become decidedly worse of late. People are aggressive; old and young can’t get along. “There was a day we didn’t have to lock our doors in Dublin.” All this is delivered mildly and with an incongruous chuckle. “There’s jealousy over women, men fighting over the ladies. There are these contraceptives. Now,” he wags a finger, “there was none of that when I was young. No.” He shakes his head gleefully.
When the train comes, he doesn’t board, but moves to a new bench. Inside, I sit across from an enormous black kid in a stocking cap and his Arab friend with a thin black beard. I try to imagine what they look like without earphones.
Boxes and Tubes
Easter Sunday, the tourists are still out. The streets of London are crowded, and many venues are open. Over my coffee, I try to remember what we Americans do on Easter. What were holidays about? I ask myself. The tourists will say it’s about touring.
My own touring continues. The day before Easter, Jayne invites us for an afternoon visit to an exhibition in the Somerset House. The Somerset House is an exhibit in itself, a turn-of-the-century governmental mansion on the Thames, with an impressive cobble-stoned courtyard inside. All this, you reflect, built for Inland Revenue. Serene classical stone for a corps of accountants. So be it. Now it’s a stop on the museum circuit.
Inside is a show of Russian photography from the 20s and earlier. They are remarkable little dreams, silver and sepia ghosts from a strange era – young dancers acting out myths and spells, dark peasants lost inside a haze of centuries. The art itself survives as a fragile moment between the czars and the Soviets. There is something to mourn in each tiny square.
Wander into the next set of small, dim rooms, and you’re confronted with quite a different world, the sparkle of aristocratic Europe strutting in powdered wigs. It’s a collection of snuff boxes. Dazzling spectacles these small items are, – (and yet hardly pocket-size; I wonder who carries these kits around) – caked with diamonds, sculpted ivory and gold, colorful enamel, and oval portraits or pastorals in miniature. I’m hypnotized. The gems are lit in such a way that they come to life.
One evening, I explore Notting Hill. “Since the movie,” Jayne says, the neighborhood has become even more chic and expensive. That’s the strange logic of modern cities. It’s cute, I decide, but it has that introverted, immaculate uniformity I’ve observed in all the wealthy neighborhoods in the West End.
By an odd set of circumstances, I have found myself in possession of a free ticket to a small but prestigious theatre in Notting Hill, the Gate Theatre. Below is a pub full of Hugh Grant wannabes. Upstairs is a confined little venue, recognizable the world over as the ubiquitous and magical black box. But this is England!
The show consists of two short plays by Pinter, who has himself participated in rehearsals, to the extent that a very old man with cancer can. The scripts are a bit tired, honestly – windows into the modernist-becoming-postmodernist mind, messages of meaningless, or meaningless messages about meaning, with meaning and for the meaning, or some such overwrought conundrum. An old man and wife air baskets of desperate alienation for the benefit of a silent, old beggar.
Fortunately, we haven’t transcended flesh-and-blood directors and actors yet, and their sensitivity and their beautiful voices rescue a story or a whole collection of stories from the morass. I am transported.
After the curtain, there is the London Tube. Always there is the London Tube.
An old black man sits across from me. He wears a sporty plaid cap. He’s compact; his fingernails are long. His eyes are warm and thoughtful. He can’t sit still. He fidgets even more fretfully as we enter King’s Cross station. He can’t contain himself. He tells the black ladies next to him in a Caribbean lilt, “This is the first stop from Jamaica. This is the stop.” They are confused. “After the plane and then the train...” Oh, they say, this was the first place you saw in London. That’s nice. He nods, and he watches the station disappear again. He settles into happy thoughts.
I’m waiting at a station, almost as far as Hackney. The overland trains are infrequent. There’s an old, ruddy-faced man on a nearby bench. He wears a luxuriant, chestnut wig. His two front teeth remain to him, though they are chipped and have absorbed their fair share of tobacco.
In a soft brogue, he informs me that things have become decidedly worse of late. People are aggressive; old and young can’t get along. “There was a day we didn’t have to lock our doors in Dublin.” All this is delivered mildly and with an incongruous chuckle. “There’s jealousy over women, men fighting over the ladies. There are these contraceptives. Now,” he wags a finger, “there was none of that when I was young. No.” He shakes his head gleefully.
When the train comes, he doesn’t board, but moves to a new bench. Inside, I sit across from an enormous black kid in a stocking cap and his Arab friend with a thin black beard. I try to imagine what they look like without earphones.
Monday, April 10, 2006
Travelogue 131 – April 10
Space and Domes
Skies have been blue. The clouds make way for sunshine. It races across the city, making sidewalks white and warming my back. I take this opportunity to indulge in one of my deepest longings and most secret fantasies from the long months in Ethiopia: I take long walks in the park.
I go to Green Park, sandwiched between elegant Mayfair on one side and Buckingham Palace on the other. I walk the length of it several times, soaking in the beauty of man’s work, the height of imperial architecture on my right, while I revel in the quiet green spaces to my left. The cherry trees are blossoming. The other trees are beginning to bud. Banks of daffodils stand here and there, swaying bright yellow in the fragile sunshine.
Green Park isn’t big enough. I want more space to celebrate my freedom from African claustrophobia. I pass under the huge arch of the Wellington monument, across the river of traffic, and into Hyde Park. Here there is room. I return several days in a row to explore the avenues, paths, gardens, and broad meadows. It’s the perfect balm to my space-starved soul.
In the northeastern corner of the park is Speaker’s Corner. I stop by several times, expecting to find ranters round the clock. There’s nothing, no podium, no pentacle. Eventually I find out that speakers are only allowed on Sundays. Somehow that dilutes the spirit of the thing. I return on Sunday. There’s an African American Muslim on a small stepladder crying out against abortion. Freedom of speech was never pretty. There is a crowd around him, but the majority of them are facing the other way, taking pictures of the vast parkland ahead of them.
I’ve walked along most of the paths they’re capturing for dusty photo albums. And yet, in hours of exploration, I’ve only charted about half of the park, the eastern half. At my furthest point west, I can make out the shallow dome of the Royal Albert Hall.
Craig has a deal in his London passbook for tickets to Carmina Burana at the Royal Albert Hall. A group of us attends, venturing into the heady environs of Kensington, playground to the visionary and the rich in Victoria’s day. The Royal Albert Hall is a vision, round delicacy of brick and terracotta. In a band around one high level is a Greek-style frieze in terracotta, in which artisans of all types ply their trades, some in Victorian duds, some in ancient robes.
Inside is crimson grace and wide open spaces. Above us is an intriguing, ancient-seeming loggia that I vow to explore after the show and don’t. The symphony and several choruses enter. First, we get a Stravinsky that I think I understand. That’s a comfort. During intermission we taste wine and stand on plush carpets, contemplating the handsome youth that Prince Albert was. Primed with vino rosso, one settles into one’s crimson seat and surrenders to the red Gothic strains of Orff’s little ditty. Afterward, you can only blink. It seems the world is a dramatic place after all. You sigh with the burden of inspiration, wondering where and how quickly you can ditch it.
Outside, Kensington strives for its mood of grandeur. All kinds of sand castles survive the tides. Immediately outside is a quiet plaza surrounded by a variety of Victorian layer cakes. Behind the hall, in the park, is another monument to the dashing prince, the Albert Memorial, a colorful, neo-Gothic spire cum canopy for the golden man. His gilding and the gold spread liberally over this Christmas ornament shines with a recent burnishing. At four corners stand the usual clusters of conquered races. I don’t see any familiar faces among the Americans, nor among the Africans. The latter exposes an unexpected vein of grief, and I flee.
Down the hill toward the tube station, between stately rows of flats that suggest levels of delirious wealth, through museum crowds, and between the various bastions of restless empire: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial College, the Natural History Museum. The latter is a very pretty example, by the way, of 19th century England’s fetish for medievalism.
I can recommend another dome in London. I’m a regular visitor to the British Museum, where one of the world’s finest collections of antiquities is housed. I pay my respects in the chapel of the Marbles. I challenge Assyrian winged bulls. I rub shoulders with the crowd around the Rosetta Stone.
I head out into the courtyard. The museum is four large galleries placed around a huge courtyard that was redesigned for the queen’s jubilee six years ago. It’s an imposing courtyard, austere cream stone under a glass ceiling. In the center is the old reading room, round and domed like the Royal Albert Hall. But the color scheme is blue.
It’s a beautiful room, designed in the 1850s by a couple showoffs named Panizzi and Smirke. The dome just exceeds the width of that of St. Paul’s. It rises above the three layers of stacks that line the walls, baby blue with gold trim, above high arched windows, up to disc of glazed glass at the top.
Below, reading tables upholstered in blue leather radiate from the central librarian’s hub. Notable are the quaint fold-out reading stands for each reader. There’s an air of silence and reverence inside that overcomes the whispers and cameras of tourists, who are contained within a small area by the door. The ghosts of great readers sit beside you. Especially popular among the staff is Karl Marx, who was a daily visitor in his day.
Space and Domes
Skies have been blue. The clouds make way for sunshine. It races across the city, making sidewalks white and warming my back. I take this opportunity to indulge in one of my deepest longings and most secret fantasies from the long months in Ethiopia: I take long walks in the park.
I go to Green Park, sandwiched between elegant Mayfair on one side and Buckingham Palace on the other. I walk the length of it several times, soaking in the beauty of man’s work, the height of imperial architecture on my right, while I revel in the quiet green spaces to my left. The cherry trees are blossoming. The other trees are beginning to bud. Banks of daffodils stand here and there, swaying bright yellow in the fragile sunshine.
Green Park isn’t big enough. I want more space to celebrate my freedom from African claustrophobia. I pass under the huge arch of the Wellington monument, across the river of traffic, and into Hyde Park. Here there is room. I return several days in a row to explore the avenues, paths, gardens, and broad meadows. It’s the perfect balm to my space-starved soul.
In the northeastern corner of the park is Speaker’s Corner. I stop by several times, expecting to find ranters round the clock. There’s nothing, no podium, no pentacle. Eventually I find out that speakers are only allowed on Sundays. Somehow that dilutes the spirit of the thing. I return on Sunday. There’s an African American Muslim on a small stepladder crying out against abortion. Freedom of speech was never pretty. There is a crowd around him, but the majority of them are facing the other way, taking pictures of the vast parkland ahead of them.
I’ve walked along most of the paths they’re capturing for dusty photo albums. And yet, in hours of exploration, I’ve only charted about half of the park, the eastern half. At my furthest point west, I can make out the shallow dome of the Royal Albert Hall.
Craig has a deal in his London passbook for tickets to Carmina Burana at the Royal Albert Hall. A group of us attends, venturing into the heady environs of Kensington, playground to the visionary and the rich in Victoria’s day. The Royal Albert Hall is a vision, round delicacy of brick and terracotta. In a band around one high level is a Greek-style frieze in terracotta, in which artisans of all types ply their trades, some in Victorian duds, some in ancient robes.
Inside is crimson grace and wide open spaces. Above us is an intriguing, ancient-seeming loggia that I vow to explore after the show and don’t. The symphony and several choruses enter. First, we get a Stravinsky that I think I understand. That’s a comfort. During intermission we taste wine and stand on plush carpets, contemplating the handsome youth that Prince Albert was. Primed with vino rosso, one settles into one’s crimson seat and surrenders to the red Gothic strains of Orff’s little ditty. Afterward, you can only blink. It seems the world is a dramatic place after all. You sigh with the burden of inspiration, wondering where and how quickly you can ditch it.
Outside, Kensington strives for its mood of grandeur. All kinds of sand castles survive the tides. Immediately outside is a quiet plaza surrounded by a variety of Victorian layer cakes. Behind the hall, in the park, is another monument to the dashing prince, the Albert Memorial, a colorful, neo-Gothic spire cum canopy for the golden man. His gilding and the gold spread liberally over this Christmas ornament shines with a recent burnishing. At four corners stand the usual clusters of conquered races. I don’t see any familiar faces among the Americans, nor among the Africans. The latter exposes an unexpected vein of grief, and I flee.
Down the hill toward the tube station, between stately rows of flats that suggest levels of delirious wealth, through museum crowds, and between the various bastions of restless empire: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Imperial College, the Natural History Museum. The latter is a very pretty example, by the way, of 19th century England’s fetish for medievalism.
I can recommend another dome in London. I’m a regular visitor to the British Museum, where one of the world’s finest collections of antiquities is housed. I pay my respects in the chapel of the Marbles. I challenge Assyrian winged bulls. I rub shoulders with the crowd around the Rosetta Stone.
I head out into the courtyard. The museum is four large galleries placed around a huge courtyard that was redesigned for the queen’s jubilee six years ago. It’s an imposing courtyard, austere cream stone under a glass ceiling. In the center is the old reading room, round and domed like the Royal Albert Hall. But the color scheme is blue.
It’s a beautiful room, designed in the 1850s by a couple showoffs named Panizzi and Smirke. The dome just exceeds the width of that of St. Paul’s. It rises above the three layers of stacks that line the walls, baby blue with gold trim, above high arched windows, up to disc of glazed glass at the top.
Below, reading tables upholstered in blue leather radiate from the central librarian’s hub. Notable are the quaint fold-out reading stands for each reader. There’s an air of silence and reverence inside that overcomes the whispers and cameras of tourists, who are contained within a small area by the door. The ghosts of great readers sit beside you. Especially popular among the staff is Karl Marx, who was a daily visitor in his day.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Travelogue 130 – April 3
Enduring
I’m waiting for Craig under Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. Craig is arriving from Minneapolis. He’ll be the first person from home I’ve seen in almost a year. I’ve only just arrived from Bath an hour ago.
Peaceful Bath, limestone yellow and elegant Bath, nestled in among the western hills, hills so green they glow, nestled in under clouds quiet and fast. Peaceful Bath, and yet I feel beleaguered by the fiery purpose in everyone’s eyes and pace. The blonde headmaster at our sister school sits on the table’s edge and leans in. She shoots questions and interrupts answers. Her smile is sincere and deliberate. Her interest is real and clocked. I rally, but the ritual is so purposeful as to be meaningless. A successful meeting feels a bit empty as you are rushed out the door. I suppose we console ourselves by proliferating the meetings.
London is grey. I don’t expect any less, and indeed the prospect of grey skies is comforting. It’s a relief, like the blessed anonymity on the streets. No one among the stream of faces finds me worth a second glance. I’m happy.
The mottled grey in the sky inspires me. There’s something noble about it. It’s a sensible nobility, nobility that only blows bugles when absolutely necessary. Daylight is rationed. When it breaks through we smile, but we don’t skip. When it passes, we aren’t fazed. We walk; we don’t run. Light is measured and understated. It will last that way. There will be light left for Jesus when he comes. He comes as a street sweeper. Leave the dramatics for the Italians.
There’s nothing unsteady about the patchy sky, nothing fickle about the breezes. They impart a sense of endurance. They say that all endures in Britain. They tell us to be comfortable with time. Everything passes into the sea, so be at ease. This is undoubtedly the key to the Brits’ legendary aura of dignity. It’s another source of relief for an American raised to challenge time like a rival gunslinger. Guess who wins.
London perseveres. Everything speaks of it: the proliferation of long streets replete with centuries of monuments in stone; the victorious facades of houses, public buildings, and theatres; this rich world of clean, brown brick; even the constellations of faces and languages one passes through on the streets, progeny of empire. That London survives has comforted many a Brit who incontinently has let mortality trouble him. I can sense that.
Nelson stands unperturbed, his gaze directed out toward the Thames and toward Parliament, despite the indignities at his feet. Scaffolding has risen around the base of his column; and the monstrous, black lions so fond of posing with tourists are bound in by a blue barrier during restoration.
At least his back is turned to the latest addition to the square’s otherwise grand statuary, a modern monstrosity in white marble. She turns away from the square, appropriately. The face is blank and lacking all character. She’s pregnant – and naked (need I add that?) Her arms are shriveled stumps, and her legs are stunted. The artist can’t leave well enough alone. He inflicts upon us a statement, something about the model and his renewed faith in life and.... Nelson watches the cloud cover as it follows the currents of the river.
Craig arrives. In the evening, we dive into the stream of time with our local friends, dodging into various pubs off Fleet Street, skipping among centuries in pubs that were banks and courts, finally arriving at one of the earliest specimens, Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, a set of rooms in dark, undulating wood that may have been frequented by Dr. Johnson, whose house is a few blocks away. The sign outside says, “Rebuilt 1667.”
The tiny rooms are stacked four levels high. Many of them are reserved for private parties. Below street level, the walls dissolve into indistinct, rounded shadows to match the burgeoning haze from your smoky pints. You contemplate the bare bellies of working class girls who might think they’re on TV, or the big bellies of scriveners in ill-fitting button-down shirts who shout when they laugh. There’s a voice like the good doctor’s in your head as you take the measure of your fellow man.
Enduring
I’m waiting for Craig under Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square. Craig is arriving from Minneapolis. He’ll be the first person from home I’ve seen in almost a year. I’ve only just arrived from Bath an hour ago.
Peaceful Bath, limestone yellow and elegant Bath, nestled in among the western hills, hills so green they glow, nestled in under clouds quiet and fast. Peaceful Bath, and yet I feel beleaguered by the fiery purpose in everyone’s eyes and pace. The blonde headmaster at our sister school sits on the table’s edge and leans in. She shoots questions and interrupts answers. Her smile is sincere and deliberate. Her interest is real and clocked. I rally, but the ritual is so purposeful as to be meaningless. A successful meeting feels a bit empty as you are rushed out the door. I suppose we console ourselves by proliferating the meetings.
London is grey. I don’t expect any less, and indeed the prospect of grey skies is comforting. It’s a relief, like the blessed anonymity on the streets. No one among the stream of faces finds me worth a second glance. I’m happy.
The mottled grey in the sky inspires me. There’s something noble about it. It’s a sensible nobility, nobility that only blows bugles when absolutely necessary. Daylight is rationed. When it breaks through we smile, but we don’t skip. When it passes, we aren’t fazed. We walk; we don’t run. Light is measured and understated. It will last that way. There will be light left for Jesus when he comes. He comes as a street sweeper. Leave the dramatics for the Italians.
There’s nothing unsteady about the patchy sky, nothing fickle about the breezes. They impart a sense of endurance. They say that all endures in Britain. They tell us to be comfortable with time. Everything passes into the sea, so be at ease. This is undoubtedly the key to the Brits’ legendary aura of dignity. It’s another source of relief for an American raised to challenge time like a rival gunslinger. Guess who wins.
London perseveres. Everything speaks of it: the proliferation of long streets replete with centuries of monuments in stone; the victorious facades of houses, public buildings, and theatres; this rich world of clean, brown brick; even the constellations of faces and languages one passes through on the streets, progeny of empire. That London survives has comforted many a Brit who incontinently has let mortality trouble him. I can sense that.
Nelson stands unperturbed, his gaze directed out toward the Thames and toward Parliament, despite the indignities at his feet. Scaffolding has risen around the base of his column; and the monstrous, black lions so fond of posing with tourists are bound in by a blue barrier during restoration.
At least his back is turned to the latest addition to the square’s otherwise grand statuary, a modern monstrosity in white marble. She turns away from the square, appropriately. The face is blank and lacking all character. She’s pregnant – and naked (need I add that?) Her arms are shriveled stumps, and her legs are stunted. The artist can’t leave well enough alone. He inflicts upon us a statement, something about the model and his renewed faith in life and.... Nelson watches the cloud cover as it follows the currents of the river.
Craig arrives. In the evening, we dive into the stream of time with our local friends, dodging into various pubs off Fleet Street, skipping among centuries in pubs that were banks and courts, finally arriving at one of the earliest specimens, Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, a set of rooms in dark, undulating wood that may have been frequented by Dr. Johnson, whose house is a few blocks away. The sign outside says, “Rebuilt 1667.”
The tiny rooms are stacked four levels high. Many of them are reserved for private parties. Below street level, the walls dissolve into indistinct, rounded shadows to match the burgeoning haze from your smoky pints. You contemplate the bare bellies of working class girls who might think they’re on TV, or the big bellies of scriveners in ill-fitting button-down shirts who shout when they laugh. There’s a voice like the good doctor’s in your head as you take the measure of your fellow man.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
Travelogue 129 – March 26
Money on Bread
The compound is resounding with today’s hailstorm. The storms have been coming every afternoon. The days start with clear dawn skies and then fill slowly with haughty, high-breasted clouds. By three, the skies are dark and they rumble with menace. The hail bounces with a great clatter off the iron roofs, and Jackie paces with ears down and eyes full of fear. Overhead, the hawks whistle as they cling to the boughs of eucalyptus trees that bend thirty degrees in the wind.
I’m trying to pack my bag in the dim classroom, navigating around the many-armed puddle in the middle of the room, left by yesterday’s storm. I’m boarding a plane tomorrow.
Yes, it’s the last quiet moment before leaving, all stages of exit completed but this one.
We’re well past the “gimme stage.” Ijigu wanted running shoes. He wanted a sponsorship. Sintayehu wanted the SIM card from my mobile. Tesfay wanted my camera. Hirut just wanted cash. I’m gracious. Every petition gets my full attention like it’s the first, or the only, and my refusals are reluctant and well-reasoned. I’m in good spirits.
I’ve been through the stage of relief and desperate longing to get out. I duck into a cafe where they often have their television turned to the BBC. I sit with coffee and I try to effect a temporary flight from Ethiopia, looking at wet streets in Europe where something has happened.
Maybe the technique is too effective: another white man enters with an old Abasha man. He offers me his hand, shouting, “Hello, faranji” in a heavy accent. He’s very tall. His bear’s eyes stray apart a bit behind thick glasses. He and the old man find a table in the back, but he doesn’t sit. He shouts pleasantries at the staff, and they smile with embarrassment. He seems to know Amharic. He launches into a bit of herky-jerky skista, the traditional dance, along to the music coming from the kitchen. The joke is a tedious one, and he doesn’t give it up until the staff turns off the radio.
The old man leaves, and the faranji turns his commentary to the BBC. He picks up and moves to sit by me. He repeats headlines. He asks where I’m from. He tells me he’s from “the great empire of Armenia.” America is Number Two, he declares, and I yield. My daydream of Europe is waylaid by a European.
I’ve been through the stage of contentment. Life slows, and things become timeless. Ethiopia and I separate and drift apart. We regard each other from our bubbles. In the early mornings, I drop from the first taxi like I’m dropping from a space capsule. The Abasha waiting at bus stops watch me pass. I smile. I joke with the shoeshine boys. I sit for the first coffee, the first fuel of the day, and I lean back to take in the sky, breathing deeply as though I could fill my lungs with all the morning blue.
The rock-strewn road down to the school, with its rain gully in the middle, is a road home. The hills above are aglow, the sun lighting patches of yellow grass, catching the shimmer of eucalyptus leaves, casting intriguing shadows among the ridges.
The people with their comments are my friends. Two boys call, “Money, money,” and I wave. “Money b’injera,” one calls lazily – money on bread. Language is being born. Having sunk into meaninglessness, it re-emerges as perfect nonsense.
The lights flicker. Outside, the world has sunk into deep blue smoke. At any moment, the electricity could go. I have to finish packing while I can. But I’m kind of entranced by the rain. It’s something like the end of time, so peaceful and forgiving. I want to listen to it.
Money on Bread
The compound is resounding with today’s hailstorm. The storms have been coming every afternoon. The days start with clear dawn skies and then fill slowly with haughty, high-breasted clouds. By three, the skies are dark and they rumble with menace. The hail bounces with a great clatter off the iron roofs, and Jackie paces with ears down and eyes full of fear. Overhead, the hawks whistle as they cling to the boughs of eucalyptus trees that bend thirty degrees in the wind.
I’m trying to pack my bag in the dim classroom, navigating around the many-armed puddle in the middle of the room, left by yesterday’s storm. I’m boarding a plane tomorrow.
Yes, it’s the last quiet moment before leaving, all stages of exit completed but this one.
We’re well past the “gimme stage.” Ijigu wanted running shoes. He wanted a sponsorship. Sintayehu wanted the SIM card from my mobile. Tesfay wanted my camera. Hirut just wanted cash. I’m gracious. Every petition gets my full attention like it’s the first, or the only, and my refusals are reluctant and well-reasoned. I’m in good spirits.
I’ve been through the stage of relief and desperate longing to get out. I duck into a cafe where they often have their television turned to the BBC. I sit with coffee and I try to effect a temporary flight from Ethiopia, looking at wet streets in Europe where something has happened.
Maybe the technique is too effective: another white man enters with an old Abasha man. He offers me his hand, shouting, “Hello, faranji” in a heavy accent. He’s very tall. His bear’s eyes stray apart a bit behind thick glasses. He and the old man find a table in the back, but he doesn’t sit. He shouts pleasantries at the staff, and they smile with embarrassment. He seems to know Amharic. He launches into a bit of herky-jerky skista, the traditional dance, along to the music coming from the kitchen. The joke is a tedious one, and he doesn’t give it up until the staff turns off the radio.
The old man leaves, and the faranji turns his commentary to the BBC. He picks up and moves to sit by me. He repeats headlines. He asks where I’m from. He tells me he’s from “the great empire of Armenia.” America is Number Two, he declares, and I yield. My daydream of Europe is waylaid by a European.
I’ve been through the stage of contentment. Life slows, and things become timeless. Ethiopia and I separate and drift apart. We regard each other from our bubbles. In the early mornings, I drop from the first taxi like I’m dropping from a space capsule. The Abasha waiting at bus stops watch me pass. I smile. I joke with the shoeshine boys. I sit for the first coffee, the first fuel of the day, and I lean back to take in the sky, breathing deeply as though I could fill my lungs with all the morning blue.
The rock-strewn road down to the school, with its rain gully in the middle, is a road home. The hills above are aglow, the sun lighting patches of yellow grass, catching the shimmer of eucalyptus leaves, casting intriguing shadows among the ridges.
The people with their comments are my friends. Two boys call, “Money, money,” and I wave. “Money b’injera,” one calls lazily – money on bread. Language is being born. Having sunk into meaninglessness, it re-emerges as perfect nonsense.
The lights flicker. Outside, the world has sunk into deep blue smoke. At any moment, the electricity could go. I have to finish packing while I can. But I’m kind of entranced by the rain. It’s something like the end of time, so peaceful and forgiving. I want to listen to it.
Sunday, March 19, 2006
Travelogue 128 – March 19
Durba
I haven’t heard of Durba until this morning. It’s a cloudy morning – part of a cloudy month. I’ve traveled over a mountain ridge in the company of Saba and two prospective business partners. The ridge is the one that looms over Addis Ababa, that rises above my house and the school. It’s Entoto, king of the central Ethiopian highlands. It’s a clean ridge, too. No switchbacks on the other side, no perennially shaded vales between rugged peaks. No, you climb steeply up from the city, the limits of which end at the divide, and the other side is a gentle slope into broad swaths of sunlit eucalyptus, and, further on, into yellow, unfenced pasture lands.
Our aim is little Chancho, a roadside town nestled among a cluster of round, brown hills. It’s a government center. We approach the officials with African humility and fear. They respond with suspicion. There’s always a need for schools out here. Chancho itself is well provided for by some Baptists. But in the countryside. And then there’s Durba.
It’s a growing town, almost as big as Chancho. It has a cement factory, and the Dutch have moved in with their flower farms. There’s another factory in the plans. The only way to get there is an erratic, crowded taxi down a dirt road. The taxi only comes back if there happen to be enough passengers.
Our colleagues search for another way out there, a driver of our own. By the uniformity of the haggling, I’m guessing we aren’t the first faranjis this way. After an hour, we find a van driver willing to drop his price to something only mildly offensive. It’s not a bad road, and the mellow hills develop real beauty as we head out of brown Chancho. The driver stops to pick up farmers.
People in the countryside dress very eclectically. Wide-brimmed hats, or none, walking sticks, blankets over their shoulders, shorts or slacks, shoes in all ragged styles. There’s a certain type of thick-woven, country bumpkin suit coat that you will find all over Ethiopia, even in the remotest hills. The shepherds we pass, with switches in hand, are wearing suit coats.
Contracts in Ethiopia, especially with drivers, change color with the passage of the sun across the sky. Our business concluded, we find we have been passed off to a truck driver leaving the cement factory. We cram into the back of his cabin. He and his comrade are salt-of-the-earth, contented guys in no hurry. They stop for a mother and child. They stop for an old man, though we have to stop in another hundred yards to eject him because he is incoherently drunk. To our good fortune, the truck is headed to Addis, so we stay with them, bent into the space behind their seats. The driver makes my companions laugh, so it’s all good.
Durba is one street and a few lanes. We stroll the length of the street first, spotting the kebele, or government, office with its dirt courtyard. We take pictures; we talk with locals. We follow a mother and child down a narrow dirt lane that turns to parallel Main Street. I stop at the turn. “What?” Across a small field of baby eucalyptus, the ground drops away. Across a dramatic red valley are Arizona buttes. Mist drifts from the mouths of distant canyons.
The kebele folk are a dapper young guy and a tall, clumsy policeman leaning on the rail of their porch. The young fellow has an easy smile and sleepy manner. It feels like Andy Griffith, African style. After a few jokes, we get to business. They had tried setting up a kindergarten a year ago; it hadn’t worked out. They have some land set aside for the purpose. He leads us behind the kebele office. “What?” My jaw drops. The plot of grassy land sits at the edge of another, more dramatic canyon. I beg our host to let me take some pictures. Ethiopian officials have a strange phobia of cameras.
It’s time to go. We are led to our new chauffers. They are idling on the grounds of the cement factory at the end of Main Street, talking to some sleepy guards. Our unfaithful first driver and his friends want to placate us with a little nature walk. I follow sullenly along a grassy little path. “What?”
This time I am awestruck. We emerge onto a narrow spur of land hundreds of feet above a scene that stretches for miles and miles to a hazy horizon, a ribbon of pale blue river water meandering through the middle of a grand, yellow valley, Arizona plateaus marching along in the distance out to the clouds. We are stunned – and successfully placated.
Snug in our diesel-choked compartment behind the truck driver, we look at each with round eyes and whisper, “Durba!”
Durba
I haven’t heard of Durba until this morning. It’s a cloudy morning – part of a cloudy month. I’ve traveled over a mountain ridge in the company of Saba and two prospective business partners. The ridge is the one that looms over Addis Ababa, that rises above my house and the school. It’s Entoto, king of the central Ethiopian highlands. It’s a clean ridge, too. No switchbacks on the other side, no perennially shaded vales between rugged peaks. No, you climb steeply up from the city, the limits of which end at the divide, and the other side is a gentle slope into broad swaths of sunlit eucalyptus, and, further on, into yellow, unfenced pasture lands.
Our aim is little Chancho, a roadside town nestled among a cluster of round, brown hills. It’s a government center. We approach the officials with African humility and fear. They respond with suspicion. There’s always a need for schools out here. Chancho itself is well provided for by some Baptists. But in the countryside. And then there’s Durba.
It’s a growing town, almost as big as Chancho. It has a cement factory, and the Dutch have moved in with their flower farms. There’s another factory in the plans. The only way to get there is an erratic, crowded taxi down a dirt road. The taxi only comes back if there happen to be enough passengers.
Our colleagues search for another way out there, a driver of our own. By the uniformity of the haggling, I’m guessing we aren’t the first faranjis this way. After an hour, we find a van driver willing to drop his price to something only mildly offensive. It’s not a bad road, and the mellow hills develop real beauty as we head out of brown Chancho. The driver stops to pick up farmers.
People in the countryside dress very eclectically. Wide-brimmed hats, or none, walking sticks, blankets over their shoulders, shorts or slacks, shoes in all ragged styles. There’s a certain type of thick-woven, country bumpkin suit coat that you will find all over Ethiopia, even in the remotest hills. The shepherds we pass, with switches in hand, are wearing suit coats.
Contracts in Ethiopia, especially with drivers, change color with the passage of the sun across the sky. Our business concluded, we find we have been passed off to a truck driver leaving the cement factory. We cram into the back of his cabin. He and his comrade are salt-of-the-earth, contented guys in no hurry. They stop for a mother and child. They stop for an old man, though we have to stop in another hundred yards to eject him because he is incoherently drunk. To our good fortune, the truck is headed to Addis, so we stay with them, bent into the space behind their seats. The driver makes my companions laugh, so it’s all good.
Durba is one street and a few lanes. We stroll the length of the street first, spotting the kebele, or government, office with its dirt courtyard. We take pictures; we talk with locals. We follow a mother and child down a narrow dirt lane that turns to parallel Main Street. I stop at the turn. “What?” Across a small field of baby eucalyptus, the ground drops away. Across a dramatic red valley are Arizona buttes. Mist drifts from the mouths of distant canyons.
The kebele folk are a dapper young guy and a tall, clumsy policeman leaning on the rail of their porch. The young fellow has an easy smile and sleepy manner. It feels like Andy Griffith, African style. After a few jokes, we get to business. They had tried setting up a kindergarten a year ago; it hadn’t worked out. They have some land set aside for the purpose. He leads us behind the kebele office. “What?” My jaw drops. The plot of grassy land sits at the edge of another, more dramatic canyon. I beg our host to let me take some pictures. Ethiopian officials have a strange phobia of cameras.
It’s time to go. We are led to our new chauffers. They are idling on the grounds of the cement factory at the end of Main Street, talking to some sleepy guards. Our unfaithful first driver and his friends want to placate us with a little nature walk. I follow sullenly along a grassy little path. “What?”
This time I am awestruck. We emerge onto a narrow spur of land hundreds of feet above a scene that stretches for miles and miles to a hazy horizon, a ribbon of pale blue river water meandering through the middle of a grand, yellow valley, Arizona plateaus marching along in the distance out to the clouds. We are stunned – and successfully placated.
Snug in our diesel-choked compartment behind the truck driver, we look at each with round eyes and whisper, “Durba!”
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Travelogue 127 – March 12
A Saturday
Lidya is the first one to school on Saturday morning. She knocks on the gate. Naturally, I’m the only one around. She sets her timid round eyes on me. “Good morning, Mister.” She’s clutching her lunch bag to her breast. I’m sure I look a little wild after a long sleep.
She marches into the classroom and puts her lunch on the shelf. She marches out again, straight to the swing. “Mister Dana, gufan,” she says. It’s a refrain I hear daily. “Push me.” And suddenly, the shy girl I’ve known for a year and a half transforms. She chatters. She wants me to push her so her feet touch the corrugated iron of the sheltering roof. She squeals every time I pretend to send her flying. I stand in front of her and tap the toes of her worn boots. She’s full of little stories, this child who always stands apart from the other kids.
It occurs to me that little children here are rarely alone. She lives in the mess next door to the school, the patch of mud around which about ten families live in their tiny earthen shacks.
I leave her to her fun, and after a while she follows. It’s time for breakfast – a few crackers in the pocket of her heavy grey dress. It’s as heavy as wool, and has lines of tiny faded roses down its skirt. It reminds me of “Little House on the Prairie”.
She has me open the package for her. Stuffing one biscuit into her mouth, she runs to the swing, turns around and runs back, holding one out for me. “Nibla,” she says. “Let’s eat,” the polite offer of food. No, thank you. She runs away.
More students arrive. Saturday mornings, Martina comes to tell stories to the kids. Martina is a German student of education, and she loves our well-behaved children.
I start to tell Carla about my kids. I’m visiting her on the weekend because the visa monster is chasing me out of Ethiopia before the end of my Italian course. She will tutor me so I can take the exam early and collect my certificate.
She doesn’t tutor me. I arrive during Fernando’s tutorial. Fernando is a fifty year-old UN official from Spain. He has the piercing eyes and the accent of his countrymen, and a severe gentleness of manner that contrasts starkly with Carla’s. She interrupts, she scolds, she smokes, she tells stories, and spits when she speaks.
Fernando is working on prepositions. He reads sentences aloud, and I notice that with his Latin-trained tongue, he can rattle off chains of words in a way that I will never master, but his pronunciation often slips into Spanish.
Carla encourages us to converse in Italian, but when she leaves the room, we chat in a mixture of Spanish and English – mostly complaints about the peculiarities of Italian.
Carla and I begin wasting Fernando’s money in earnest, going on about the exam and about my approaching trip to Italia. She rhapsodizes about Italian cities and history and culture. As long as she’s rhapsodizing, I get her started on Dante. I recite the first tercet, and she carries on with ten more, tears welling in her eyes. We catalogue authors and artists, and pretty soon, it’s time for Fernando to go. He pays and leaves quietly.
Carla asks how I like Ethiopia. I’m ambiguous in my reply. She has to know why I’m not married, and I laugh. It’s a question I’m used to from Ethiopians. “Are you married?” and the subsequent moral diatribe are integral to introductory conversation here. I have no reason to hide the story of Leeza. I want it to lead to the kids, but somehow these exchanges never get past Leeza. When I search for words about the kids, there aren’t any. What can one say about kids, really? We sadly conclude. I say, “Baka.” She says, “Cosi.”
A Saturday
Lidya is the first one to school on Saturday morning. She knocks on the gate. Naturally, I’m the only one around. She sets her timid round eyes on me. “Good morning, Mister.” She’s clutching her lunch bag to her breast. I’m sure I look a little wild after a long sleep.
She marches into the classroom and puts her lunch on the shelf. She marches out again, straight to the swing. “Mister Dana, gufan,” she says. It’s a refrain I hear daily. “Push me.” And suddenly, the shy girl I’ve known for a year and a half transforms. She chatters. She wants me to push her so her feet touch the corrugated iron of the sheltering roof. She squeals every time I pretend to send her flying. I stand in front of her and tap the toes of her worn boots. She’s full of little stories, this child who always stands apart from the other kids.
It occurs to me that little children here are rarely alone. She lives in the mess next door to the school, the patch of mud around which about ten families live in their tiny earthen shacks.
I leave her to her fun, and after a while she follows. It’s time for breakfast – a few crackers in the pocket of her heavy grey dress. It’s as heavy as wool, and has lines of tiny faded roses down its skirt. It reminds me of “Little House on the Prairie”.
She has me open the package for her. Stuffing one biscuit into her mouth, she runs to the swing, turns around and runs back, holding one out for me. “Nibla,” she says. “Let’s eat,” the polite offer of food. No, thank you. She runs away.
More students arrive. Saturday mornings, Martina comes to tell stories to the kids. Martina is a German student of education, and she loves our well-behaved children.
I start to tell Carla about my kids. I’m visiting her on the weekend because the visa monster is chasing me out of Ethiopia before the end of my Italian course. She will tutor me so I can take the exam early and collect my certificate.
She doesn’t tutor me. I arrive during Fernando’s tutorial. Fernando is a fifty year-old UN official from Spain. He has the piercing eyes and the accent of his countrymen, and a severe gentleness of manner that contrasts starkly with Carla’s. She interrupts, she scolds, she smokes, she tells stories, and spits when she speaks.
Fernando is working on prepositions. He reads sentences aloud, and I notice that with his Latin-trained tongue, he can rattle off chains of words in a way that I will never master, but his pronunciation often slips into Spanish.
Carla encourages us to converse in Italian, but when she leaves the room, we chat in a mixture of Spanish and English – mostly complaints about the peculiarities of Italian.
Carla and I begin wasting Fernando’s money in earnest, going on about the exam and about my approaching trip to Italia. She rhapsodizes about Italian cities and history and culture. As long as she’s rhapsodizing, I get her started on Dante. I recite the first tercet, and she carries on with ten more, tears welling in her eyes. We catalogue authors and artists, and pretty soon, it’s time for Fernando to go. He pays and leaves quietly.
Carla asks how I like Ethiopia. I’m ambiguous in my reply. She has to know why I’m not married, and I laugh. It’s a question I’m used to from Ethiopians. “Are you married?” and the subsequent moral diatribe are integral to introductory conversation here. I have no reason to hide the story of Leeza. I want it to lead to the kids, but somehow these exchanges never get past Leeza. When I search for words about the kids, there aren’t any. What can one say about kids, really? We sadly conclude. I say, “Baka.” She says, “Cosi.”
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Travelogue 126 – March 4
Word Play
Francois has just returned from nearly a month in Tigray, a region in the north of Ethiopia, dusty, poor, and religious. He was visiting churches and holy places for his research on that elusive piece of the Holy Cross that left a long trail of miracles across medieval Tigray. They speak a different language there. In Tigrenya, Francois’s name sounds like “fresh beer”, which is delightful to northern priests who drink a lot of the homebrew.
Francois and I have many epithets in the streets of Addis. One that makes the kids hysterical is “gamash faranj, gamash Abasha,” meaning half faranj and half Ethiopian. Others simply call us kayu, meaning red man. They don’t normally say “white man” here, unless it’s in imitation of the American term. Kayu fits Francois pretty well, since his face is always red from the sun. I’m a small part native American, so I feel I’ve earned the honorific. A name I’ve picked up from the shoeshine boys and beggars in my neighborhood is dembenya, or “the regular.” Kids I’ve never seen try it on me, seeing that I respond.
“Tafa,” they say. This word is a standard part of greetings here, best intoned in a lazy way: “you disappeared.” Don’t take it too literally. People will say it even if they’ve seen you the day before. The proper response is allo, a phrase I dearly love. Every night, when I greet Girma, the school guard, and ask, “How are you?” he says, “allo.” I’m not sure how to translate it, other than “being.” In response to “Tafa,” it means, “I’m around.”
“Tafa,” they say at the cafe if I miss a day. Ijigu is my dembenya waiter. I used to ask him about soccer results. Now I ask him about his training. I promise to bring my Sauconys for him to look at. I found out recently he’s a top-notch marathoner, trying to make the national team. He tells me his time in change, “two and twenty-five cents.” It’s funny how your image of a person can change. He has a kind of slack, farm-boy face, and I never thought much of him before. Now, he’s a star. I tip him extra. His name, Ijigu, means the Best.
I made a date with a waitress the other night by accident. That was at the hotel next to the Italian Center. She brought me my mineral water and my fries. I was cheerful. There was a nice movie on the TV, something fun, something with Brits being naughty in WWI-era London. I playfully say, “Nibla” to the waitress, an invitation to have some fries. Polite Ethiopians never start eating without offering some of their food, even to strangers. She declines, and I think she’s saying that she gets her dinner break now. She’s pointing toward what must be the break room. I nod agreeably. When she returns, I ask how her dinner was. There is some confusion. Apparently she hasn’t eaten. But maybe another time. Ah, I see. Yes, that would be nice. She’s being shy and sweet. Her co-workers are stealing girlish glances at me. Well, why resist? She’s cute.
The law is words, and yet words fail here. They dissolve into the pea-green gloom of Immigration hallways. We’re back. This time we’re being led through by our companion, the guy with bad teeth who looks like he would sell hot gold on the pavement. We wend our way through the rooms, by all the same desks, still slowly, still confronted with the impertinent questions, and yet things seem to resolve with a wrinkled brow and a wave. We make it to the dark angel’s office. Our gold broker goes in alone. The door, usually left open, swings silently shut. I see a fellow teacher from happier times, a Brit whose Ethiopian ex-wife has had his residency cancelled. Apparently, he has little recourse, even though he is father to her baby boy. We discuss the stench of evil pervading, until the door slowly opens, and our ‘advocate’ emerges with a swagger. No words. We simply leave.
Word Play
Francois has just returned from nearly a month in Tigray, a region in the north of Ethiopia, dusty, poor, and religious. He was visiting churches and holy places for his research on that elusive piece of the Holy Cross that left a long trail of miracles across medieval Tigray. They speak a different language there. In Tigrenya, Francois’s name sounds like “fresh beer”, which is delightful to northern priests who drink a lot of the homebrew.
Francois and I have many epithets in the streets of Addis. One that makes the kids hysterical is “gamash faranj, gamash Abasha,” meaning half faranj and half Ethiopian. Others simply call us kayu, meaning red man. They don’t normally say “white man” here, unless it’s in imitation of the American term. Kayu fits Francois pretty well, since his face is always red from the sun. I’m a small part native American, so I feel I’ve earned the honorific. A name I’ve picked up from the shoeshine boys and beggars in my neighborhood is dembenya, or “the regular.” Kids I’ve never seen try it on me, seeing that I respond.
“Tafa,” they say. This word is a standard part of greetings here, best intoned in a lazy way: “you disappeared.” Don’t take it too literally. People will say it even if they’ve seen you the day before. The proper response is allo, a phrase I dearly love. Every night, when I greet Girma, the school guard, and ask, “How are you?” he says, “allo.” I’m not sure how to translate it, other than “being.” In response to “Tafa,” it means, “I’m around.”
“Tafa,” they say at the cafe if I miss a day. Ijigu is my dembenya waiter. I used to ask him about soccer results. Now I ask him about his training. I promise to bring my Sauconys for him to look at. I found out recently he’s a top-notch marathoner, trying to make the national team. He tells me his time in change, “two and twenty-five cents.” It’s funny how your image of a person can change. He has a kind of slack, farm-boy face, and I never thought much of him before. Now, he’s a star. I tip him extra. His name, Ijigu, means the Best.
I made a date with a waitress the other night by accident. That was at the hotel next to the Italian Center. She brought me my mineral water and my fries. I was cheerful. There was a nice movie on the TV, something fun, something with Brits being naughty in WWI-era London. I playfully say, “Nibla” to the waitress, an invitation to have some fries. Polite Ethiopians never start eating without offering some of their food, even to strangers. She declines, and I think she’s saying that she gets her dinner break now. She’s pointing toward what must be the break room. I nod agreeably. When she returns, I ask how her dinner was. There is some confusion. Apparently she hasn’t eaten. But maybe another time. Ah, I see. Yes, that would be nice. She’s being shy and sweet. Her co-workers are stealing girlish glances at me. Well, why resist? She’s cute.
The law is words, and yet words fail here. They dissolve into the pea-green gloom of Immigration hallways. We’re back. This time we’re being led through by our companion, the guy with bad teeth who looks like he would sell hot gold on the pavement. We wend our way through the rooms, by all the same desks, still slowly, still confronted with the impertinent questions, and yet things seem to resolve with a wrinkled brow and a wave. We make it to the dark angel’s office. Our gold broker goes in alone. The door, usually left open, swings silently shut. I see a fellow teacher from happier times, a Brit whose Ethiopian ex-wife has had his residency cancelled. Apparently, he has little recourse, even though he is father to her baby boy. We discuss the stench of evil pervading, until the door slowly opens, and our ‘advocate’ emerges with a swagger. No words. We simply leave.
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